Stapled Pages
by Anzer'ke
Summary: Chapter 5: Brockton Bay Sirens, The Day Job; Nobody likes it, but everyone knows it's true. You have to pay the bills.
1. Ceaseless

Ok, anyone reading this who has followed my previous stuff please be aware that I am not dead and have not abandoned any of my fics. I doubt that Fifty Feathers or Ningen will be updated any time soon (Sekirei has drifted away from me and Ningen needs a lot of editing and will then be a big time sink) but they **will** be updated at some point. In the meantime I'm moving into the Worm fandom for a bit and hoping to use the shift to jumpstart my writing. So here it is, the first of -hopefully- many.

AN/2. Site ate my formatting. I think it should be fine now.

_Ceaseless_

_Those hardest to reach, need reaching the most_

It was hard to remember how it had happened.

She'd been in the Docks, later than was really wise, and she'd been looking for something. Or had it been a someone? Maybe both? Or had she just been out for a late run?

Though she hadn't forgotten immediately -that much she still remembered clearly- it had faded from her memory when she realised all the other things that she had to make sure not to forget. All the faces and names and places that she could not risk approaching, that she had to keep ahold of if she was to stand any chance at all at staying sane.

Time had lost all meaning for her, but judging by her spotty memory of the event that had left her stuck like this, she estimated at least a year had passed. Probably more. Probably much more. She didn't need to sleep any more, or eat or drink or breathe or any other bodily process. She didn't even blink. So there was nothing at all to measure the time by.

Neither daylight nor darkness reached her brilliantly lit prison. The ceaseless discharge surrounding her didn't leave any objects intact enough to examine, so if anyone had tried to send messages to her (which she wasn't nearly naïve enough to believe possible anyway) she hadn't gotten them. She could at least shape her explosive aura, forming the fury into pictures and figures and forms that felt as much a part of her as her paradoxically normal body.

Unfortunately the shapes only lasted as long as her focus upon them, so her attempts at counting the seconds had met a swift end when her attention wandered away from it and the numbers returned to chaos. Then she had sworn a lot and lost her place, then sworn a lot more.

Her next idea had been to take the fine sand that was all her power had left of anything physical and not-her, then fashion an hourglass out of explosions. It had been a nice distraction at least, as well as showing her that while her power could fuse the sand together. It would re-obliterate the results the moment she stopped shaping it around them.

Trying to shield it with her body, clasping it within her fists, had proved ineffective but had explained how her new body worked a little better. It had been a shock when the glassy shrapnel had emerged from hands that blew apart into wisps of energy, then reformed before she could even process the mutilation. It did explain her survival though, she just looked normal. Really she was no different than her aura. No more human than an explosion.

She was probably going insane.

She was definitely bored out of her skull. She'd actually made a game for a while simply of thinking of all the things she would do for a single decent book. Fuck it, it didn't even have to be decent. She would read Sixty Notes of whatever if she had it. Or those stupid shapeshifter romance books.

If motherfucking Kaiser somehow turned up with a copy of Mein Kampf she would probably thank him for it. Then obliterate the evil bastard, but she'd still have thanked him and didn't that just show how utterly utterly bored she was.

Still, it was better than moving. That was the thought she had to keep fixed in her mind. All the time, every single second she had to remember not to move. Even when she inevitably lost her mind completely, she had to remember not to move. Even if she forgot everything else.

Taylor could feel her aura's full extent. Though she could only really tell what it was touching and its exact shape, towards the centre; she knew exactly where the edges were and how far they extended from her body. So she was aware that they followed her body. If she moved, the aura moved with her. Which meant that the area of destruction moved.

She had already obliterated a two block radius of her city. If she moved...

She had to stay where she was.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

She missed her dad.

The only reason she missed him any less than she missed mom was that he was still alive. At least she hoped he was still alive.

After all, it couldn't have been more than a few years yet. He'd still be okay. He might even be happy now he didn't have to deal with her weighing him down. Which was not a very nice thought, but it had a kind of happiness to it. It meant that other people were happy even if she couldn't be. Even if she had to sit here and stay the same, it meant everyone else could be happy and that was something.

It was all that she had, so it would just have to do. Even if it didn't, it would have to.

Taylor idly swirled a bunch of random shapes around herself. Then lay down in the sand, which was pretty comfy as well. Really she didn't have it all that bad, so why get upset about it.

_'I suppose the years are teaching me some wisdom.'_

Well that was another nice thou-

Something huge smashed into her aura. Blotting it out wherever it touched. Spreading further and further towards her. The shock had her on her feet before she knew she was moving. On her feet and looking in the wrong direction.

She whirled to face it, not that she could see further than a few feet, eye wide and churning with feelings she couldn't even grasp, let alone name.

Was this thing, whatever it was, going to kill her? Was that really such a bad thing? Or maybe this was a rescue attempt? Maybe someone had found a way to do what she could not and turn her powers off. Maybe she could go home.

The homesickness felt like a sucker punch. She barely noticed the strange thing abruptly shrinking. Much of the area where her aura vanished was suddenly clear. Like someone had flicked a light back on. However the bit further in towards her was unchanged, if cut off from the outside world now.

The nearest part of the thing couldn't be more than thirty feet from her. Though her little bubble of clearer space didn't extend nearly that far, she could still feel what she could not see. It was like smoke, thick smoke that seemed completely unbothered by the swirling chaos around it. In fact her aura simply refused to penetrate it, even when she shaped the tiniest sliver for that purpose and pushed it into the thing.

It just vanished on contact.

Either the thing was turning off her power, or it just destroyed whatever touched it even more thoroughly than her power did. However she could think of no way to find out without getting closer to it, which was not possible. Thirty feet might not be much, but for all she knew there might be a whole crowd of people standing just outside her aura. Thirty feet of sudden advancement would be another thirty feet of destruction. So she sat back down.

She felt like she was shattering. Like cracks had to be spiderwebbing through her because after so long in her own little world there was finally something else. And she couldn't do a damn thing about it, couldn't even check what it was. She wasn't alone. She was more alone then ever before.

Of course that was when another intruder from outside interrupted her. This time it didn't make it past the first few inches of her aura. It was too small to get much of a sense, but it definitely felt like an object of some kind. A few more followed it, then one much bigger one that made it a dozen or so feet before breaking up. The vague sense was definitely a physical object this time. Maybe a dumpster?

_'Guess I make a pretty good incinerator.'_

The thing, she decided to assume it was smoke of some kind, started moving and she decided to focus on it instead of the little intrusions that continued at irregular intervals. The smoke expanded outward, then the expansion stopped for a moment before vanishing in every direction except towards her.

Taylor braced herself for whatever it was as it continued to draw closer to her. Twenty five feet. Twenty feet. Fifteen. Then she finally saw it. Complete and absolute darkness, flattening against the edges of her bubble for some reason, it crossed inside just enough for her to be able to see it. Looking more closely at its shape and how it flowed she had been right to call it smoke. Though darkness seemed more apt given its total lack of colour.

She wondered how long it had been since she had seen darkness. Would it hurt to not see light any more? The mystery of it all would probably have driven her mad had she not had several years of solitude in which to develop patience. As she had developed patience she stayed right where she was and watched it carefully, a little bit entranced by the sight.

Then a hand reached out of it into her bubble.

She shrieked in surprise, barely stopping herself from jumping backwards. There really was a person inside it!

The hand was large and gloved, a constant layer of the smoke rolled off it. Thin enough for her to see glimpses beneath it, but not much more than that. After groping at nothing for a few more moments, an arm began to follow the hand.

Her detached thoughts on someone maybe wanting to hurt her suddenly seemed a lot more important. Especially since the person in question seemed to be able to completely ignore her aura. Still, she had to do something and the smoke pouring off this person gave her an idea.

By the time the rest of the man made it into her bubble, Taylor had shaped as dense a layer of her aura as she could manage, wrapping it about herself as a last ditch attempt at protection. The man himself had her torn between despair at her chances in a fight and an urge to stare that she would later reflect might not have been entirely the result of isolation.

He was covered head to toe, masked as well and wore his darkness like she wore her own power. Gaps still gave her a sense of what he wore, a mask styled after a skull and leathers that put her in mind of motorcycles, though she was more attentive to how he wore it. The guy was big, height combined with muscles to give him a thoroughly intimidating impression.

So a big scary man had just walked into a sanctum that she had thought inviolate. Definitely not bored any more. If she survived this then she might just learn to appreciate the boredom for a while.

Then he spoke.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

"Dammit Lisa."

His voice had a strange echo to it, like it was coming down a long tunnel towards her; however beneath that effect was a warm baritone that felt...nice. Nice enough to defuse her apprehension. Also nice enough that it took her a moment to realise what he'd actually said made no sense whatsoever.

Some kind of new slang? That seemed a bit far-fetched but it was either that or he thought she was this Lisa person. Which was wrong of course, she definitely remembered her own name, so why was he calling her Lisa...

After a few more seconds of staring at each other Taylor finally recalled that she had to say her thoughts out loud if he was to answer them. Her voice didn't come out when she opened her mouth and for a moment she struggled to recall how to talk, then with a small cough she got things in the right order.

"U-um, m-my name isn't Lisa."

There. She had spoken and now he would answer and this was what conversation was like. Like riding a bike. Though she'd never been very good at riding bikes, which might carry over into things that were like riding bikes because he wasn't replying. Instead he just cocked his head and took a hesitant step closer to her.

Then he shouted loud enough to make her ears ache.

"Who are you? Are you the one making all this?"

He gestured around them towards the end but she was too occupied with the pain of his screaming to care. Why the fuck was he being so loud? His next words came out at an even greater volume, driving her to clap hands over her ears.

"Can you understa-? Why are you doing that?"

"Why the hell do you think I would cover my ears? Stop screaming at me, please!"

This time he didn't hesitate over stepping closer, though the way he was angling his head was just weird. It was as if-

"I'm sorry but I can't hear you. Could you speak a little louder?"

-he couldn't...hear...her...

Belatedly she realised that she had no idea how loud she was being, not after so long with only the background crackling of her aura to judge sounds by. Given he wasn't clutching his own ears that probably wasn't a very loud noise at all. Or she might have super-hearing, though it would be a bit out of place with the rest of her power. Though it would also explain his weird opening line, he'd probably muttered it under his breath without intending her to hear him.

He took another step closer and Taylor pre-empted his next attempt at communication by practically hurling her hand at her own face. A finger to the vague area of her aura-masked lips seemed to get the point across. Feeling a little elated at the successful communication she held the same hand out in front of her, palm facing him.

_'Wait.'_

He got the message, not getting any closer while she slowly worked up to a more appropriate volume.

"Can you hear me now?"

This time he spoke at a reasonable volume, "Ah, yes. I can."

It was a momentous moment, her first conversation in years. She took a moment just to soak it in.

Unfortunately he didn't seem to have the years of patience training that she had benefited from, because he quickly interrupted her with a repeat of his first questions. Which she thought was rude of him and didn't hesitate to tell him.

"D-don't you think it's a little rude to just barge in and ask questions like that?" Taylor's brain caught up to her mouth and reminded her that she wanted to make a good impression.

His sudden laughter -thankfully muffled by his arm- thus caught her off guard. Was he laughing at what she said? At her? It didn't sound like mean laughter, but then she had forgotten how loud to talk so what did she know?

Tall dark and skull-faced got himself under control quickly though, this time he opened the conversation properly. A hint of a smile in his stupid echoy voice.

"Sorry for being rude. I'm Grue and I should really be thanking you. Assuming that all this," He gestured around them, "is coming from you?"

"Yes. I mean, it is. It's my power, I think. Why were you angry at Lisa?"

"Wha-? Oh, you heard that?" He sounded a little panicked, "Could you please not tell anyone else that name? Normally no-one can hear me when I'm pumping out this much darkness so I didn't think."

The babbling was kinda cute, it took some of the sting out of his words at least.

"I can't really tell anyone...You're the first person to..."

She trailed off, unable to keep talking for fear of the loneliness rising up to drown her. He picked up on the silence and filled it where she was not.

"Lisa is my friend. She likes to act like she knows everything, so it gets annoying when she misses something but doesn't tell you she's not sure. Like sending me to check out the source of the Dockside Storm and not mentioning that it might be a person."

"Is that what they're calling me?"

"Dockside Storm?" At her nod he continued, "Yeah, they've cleared everything around you too. You...you can't see outside?" It was a smaller nod this time. "Ah, well, you're probably not missing much. They've cleared everything out for a few blocks to every side, except for the dockfront obviously. To make sure that the drift doesn't damage anything."

Something in what he said snapped her out of her funk. Because it was wrong.

"What are you talking about? There's no drift!"

He took a step back at the force of her words, further from her fixed position. The same position she'd been in all along.

"I've been staying still all this time, and I can feel my aura right to the edges. It hasn't touched anything, not for more than a moment. Not until your 'darkness' slammed into it in a huge great cloud!"

Sometimes she had felt something brushing against the very edge, probably a wall right on the edge of her aura, but she'd also moved back away from it immediately. It just wasn't possible that-

"What about before that?"

"Before?"

"Yeah, I poked your aura with my darkness for a bit. I never went deep into it but that was how we figured out that I could keep us safe inside."

She hadn't felt that. Not even a twinge...she did feel all the way to the edge, right?

"Look, I'm sorry but you've moved quite a bit."

No.

"Well not that far, really. That sounded like more than I meant."

No.

"It's just been a few feet every week or so. Pretty often it, you, go back in the other direction as well, so you're only about twenty feet from where you started."

No!

"That's why they've got the clearance zone so far back. I think there's some kind of automated observation system as well."

"No!"

He stopped talking, she didn't care.

"That's not... I haven't... If that was true..."

She didn't know what to say, only that it couldn't be true. Not moving had been her mantra. The words had kept her sane. And all this time she- All this time. So much time.

He had said week. And he said how far she'd gone.

"What date is it, please?"

"..."

"Please."

"It's, it's the eleventh of April."

Well that was no help, she had no idea what date this had started on. He hadn't told her the year either. Like it wasn't relevant, but it had to be because-

"If you're trying to work it out, your aura first appeared at the end of February. It's been just under six weeks since then."

She broke.

Thought stopped.

It.

Six weeks.

It hadn't even been two months.

It felt like years.

It felt like seconds.

She was going to go mad. There was no doubt about it, she had been losing it after weeks so what the hell was she going to be like in a year. She was going to go mad and hurt people without even noticing and she couldn't even die, she was alone and mad and a useless monster and-

"Shhhh..."

Taylor had no idea when she'd fallen to her knees, or how long Grue had had his arms wrapped around her.

He hushed her again, the sound impossibly gentle as it echoed around her. Around her p-p-prison.

She started sobbing. Great heaving sobs that would probably have looked hideous if she had more than just her eyes uncovered. Which reminded her of her inhuman body and made her cry even harder.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

It was some time before she came back to herself, her hysterics having died down to a few sniffles here and there.

He was still holding her, though at some point she had thrown her own arms around him as well. Whatever weird power mechanics allowed her to cry after weeks without a drop of water, his jacket certainly wouldn't be thanking them. Not that he seemed to mind, just staying there with her on the ground.

"You're not useless."

"Huh?" was her stunningly intelligent reply.

"You saved me and my team.

I never got around to telling you, but we came in here 'cause we were being chased. We stole from Lung and he came for his pound of flesh. So we ran away and we ended up right next to you. An experiment later and we had a place to hide, so you probably saved our lives."

Her power had saved them?

Them?

She practically hurled herself to her feet at that piece of information. Looking everywhere for the rest of his team, who had probably already seen her have a nice humiliating crying session.

"Relax," Grue took his time getting up off the sand, sounding pretty calm himself. "I couldn't keep a full cloud of darkness up this close to you, so they're out there still. Probably not having fun what with being blind and deaf and everything."

She could practically see him hearing his own words, the calm demeanour vanishing like one of her glass creations to be replaced by obvious apprehension. It was enough to draw a giggle out of her, the happy sound strange to her ears. Even before she had started exploding, how long had it been since she'd laughed?

"If I really did save your lives, they probably won't mind that I kept you for so long."

"Do you mind if I tell them that you did? I'm not sure I want them to hold me responsible for however long they've been like this."

"I won't tell them if you don't."

She was smiling beneath the mask. She wasn't suddenly all better, far from it...but after crying so much she felt oddly cleansed. Enough to just enjoy the moment.

But it had to end, and she could practically feel his worry for the state of his team. If his darkness did leave them blind and deaf then she could see why. Still...

"I should probably go, I mean..."

_'No. Stay with me. Don't leave me alone again. Please don't leave me alone.' _

But a six week eternity was not enough to forget everything about how people worked, so she very carefully didn't say what she was thinking.

"You'd better go."

"Ah...yeah."

With that awkward exchange he turned around and walked back out of her bubble.

More of his darkness bloomed around him and the area where his team had been sitting all along. A short while later it extended a thin corridor right along to the edge of her aura. She could practically feel him walking along and peeping out to check things were clear.

"I probably should have asked him a bit more about that whole, 'stealing from Lung' thing."

Things must have been safe, because the corridor widened. After what she thought must a have been a few more minutes the entirety of his darkness within her aura just vanished. Not a trace remaining.

"I wonder how long it'll be before I start thinking I imagined all of that?"

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Time passed as it had for weeks, without anything to mark or divide it.

Still she was pretty sure she wasn't losing her grip too quickly. She'd decided to try counting hours instead, of course her estimate of when an hour had passed was probably horribly inaccurate but she could at least remember the count fairly well. In the meantime she swirled her aura and sketched skulls and dragons and piles of gold. Maybe a knight of two.

It had been, by her best guess, about thirty eight hours since she spoke to another human being when an area of her aura vanished again.

Unlike last time there was no hesitation. The cloud moved steadily towards her, not leaving a corridor behind it. It was a lot smaller too, probably not bringing his team with him.

Taylor had the absurd thought that she would have liked to neaten up, then a familiar hand emerged into her little bubble sanctum. It stayed there for a moment or two before she thought to respond, shaping a hand of her own and tapping it against his.

He took the invitation for what it was and she had a Grue standing before her once again. Something very tempting held loosely in his right hand. Tempting enough that she forgot all about asking him how long it had been, or why he had come back, or even thanking him for doing so.

"How are you holding that in here? I thought you said you couldn't protect anything else?"

"Nah, I just can't make any clouds without something in them. I can keep some darkness wrapped around something easily enough."

"I'm not sure I'll be able to touch it though. I might cancel your darkness or something."

"Well," he said kindly, holding up the book wrapped in wispy shadows, "I figured I'd read it to you. I haven't read this series myself yet and..."

He trailed off, maybe realising he hadn't asked her if she even liked to read. Or had she said something about books in her crying? Well whatever.

"I'd love that. If you're sure it's okay?"

He settled down on the ground instead of replying, his grin somehow transmitting right through his mask.

Grue began to read.

It took another three visits before she admitted that she'd already read, and loved, the first two books of the series he was bringing.


	2. Brockton Bay Sirens

Well since everyone kept following this despite it clearly having a "completed" attached to it, I figured I'd just turn the fic itself into another one shot series instead of posting all these separately.

_Brockton Bay Sirens_

_Some friendships are just meant to be_

Life just wasn't fair. Not exactly a ground breaking new insight, but in the proper context it could still be a little surprising.

For instance when a pretty young red head muttered those words under her breath, not pausing in her efforts to shovel the dog shit littering the grass in which she stood, the obvious assumption would be that she was upset by the labour. A glance at her would have only reinforced that impression, taking in long hair damp with sweat, once pristine clothes streaked with dirt and a posture unique to someone on the far side of a long day's work.

However that assumption would ring false with what came next. The girl did not slow in her work, or mutter anything else. After several more minutes of it she decided to shed her jacket, tying it around her waist and leaving her in just jeans and a tank top. Her change in attire revealed a lot more muscle than had been apparent with it on. Though more the tone of a gymnast than the bulk of a body builder.

Better able to deal with the heat of the afternoon sun that entered through the abundance of holes in the roof to make a greenhouse of the overgrown warehouse, she got back to work. Apparently cheerful enough to whistle snatches of several tunes while she continued.

Finally she could find nothing else to clean up. Standing straight, holding the shovel above her head and stretching her back with a sequence of pops. Giggling suddenly, she spun on her toes then thrust the shovel firmly into the dirt before hefting the barrel that she had been dumping the waste into. Her hands slipped on sweat for a moment before she found her grip and started to make for the great heap of compost in the farthest corner of the warehouse.

Then the still air was broken by a single bark.

Slamming the barrel down, the girl whipped a scarf out of her pocket and tied it around her lower face in a single practised motion. Reorienting herself to face the direction of the bark, she took a few steps to lay a hand on the haft of her shovel while keeping her eyes fixed on the battered wooden door a dozen paces in front of her, the only one not covered by the dense layer of vines on the warehouse walls and ceiling. Her body went tense as it creaked open, readying to move.

Then she relaxed when a tide of dogs poured through it. A few dozen dogs and as many combinations of breed and colour, all of them staying oddly silent. Though many of them showed no such restraint in rushing the red head and showing their affection physically as she laughed and tried just as hard to return it.

So when the door finally admitted a human being, albeit one holding one last little dog securely in one arm, the gruff looking blonde was greeted by the sight of a red head almost buried beneath canines. She snorted in apparent amusement and put down her burden while swinging the door closed with her other hand. Which was the cue for the dogs to drop the trained silence, a cacophony of barking now adding to the chaos that echoed strangely around the place.

"Emma, they're gonna knock over the shit barrel." Greeted the blonde.

Emma, as the red head was now identified, burst wide-eyed from the pile of furry quadrupeds. Only to pull up short when she saw that the dogpile had come no where near the barrel, other than a few loners sniffing curiously around it. Her stunned expression melted into a smile at the chuckles of the other teen and soon she was laughing right along with her.

"Good one Rach," Emma stifled the last of her laughter; "how was the walk? No problems?"

Turning to face the blonde for first time since she entered the building Emma pulled down her mask and lifted her chin in greeting. Taking in her friend's appearance while the other girl nodded her acknowledgement at the brief baring of Emma's throat -and the thin scar across it- and paused before her reply.

Rachel was as bulky as Emma was toned, wearing a T-shirt with a faded Disney princess on it and a pair of canvas trousers tucked into sturdy boots. Her blonde hair was wild about her shoulders though it showed clear signs of care, framing a face that was strong but not exactly pretty. Whether the scar that ran across her left cheek and nicked her ear added to her appearance or not was a muddier subject, though Emma privately thought it gave her something of the look of a fierce alley cat. She had a thick bundle of leashes coiled around one shoulder and tapped her fingers on them as her features scrunched with thought.

"No new gang signs, fuckers have learned that much. But I saw some strangers."

Emma didn't insult her by asking if she'd been followed, skipping to the more important questions, "Is Brutus' leg doing any better? Oh, and Tiger is still giving the warning signal when it's just you."

A doberman/bulldog mongrel and the tiny ball of fur Rachel had carried inside each perked up at their respective names. The latter running to where Emma was putting down the emptied poo barrel and running around her feet until she gave in and started stroking him.

"Brutus was outrunning most of them," Rachel replied fondly; "he's healed up well. That vet was good."

_You were right about the vet, I'm sorry I yelled at you. I was worried about Brutus._ Emma translated in the privacy of her head.

"What about Tiger? It's kinda nerve-wracking not knowing if we're about to be attacked or not, you know?"

"He's young still, he'll learn. But Angelica can watch tonight."

With that she made her way back to the door, joined by a one-eyed alsatian on her way there.

Opening it onto a side street at dusk, the false sunlight spilled out while she gave Angelica a treat and ushered her out to where a pile of junk concealed a space with several blankets and a well gnawed bone. The dog settled down quietly in the cavity after nosing the escape tunnel at the back of it, then patiently endured Rachel fussing over her comfort.

Watching her through the doorway, Emma repeated her earlier musing under her breath, life wasn't fair. Not for her friend and saviour. Not for the kindest person she knew.

Her mind drifted back to the day they'd first met, back when she'd been the kind of dumb kid who would probably have sneered at Rachel's dress sense and thought nothing else of the girl if they'd met. The kind of girl who had no idea what to do when jumped by a gang except for screaming down the phone about how scared she was and then blubbering about the monsters she could see coming down the alley behind her attackers before they had smashed her phone and pressed a knife into her throat.

The monsters that had saved her life and her dad's. The monsters whose controller had come right along with them, leaping onto a much taller girl and laying into the gang bitch that had been enjoying Emma's fear a few moments before. The monsters that hadn't been monsters at all.

The real monster had been the dark shape up on the roofs that would have put a crossbow bolt through Rachel's eye instead of her ear if not for Emma shouting a warning. That had dropped down and driven off her saviour like she was the hero, when she'd just sat and watched it all happen. That introduced itself as Shadow Stalker and that her dad had thanked as if he hadn't seen what really happened.

The dark shape that she had punched.

The sound of the door closing as Rachel came back inside had the dogs making noise again and snapped Emma out of her memories of finding the blonde later that long ago night and helping to patch her up. The other girl had never had much time for reminiscing, one thing Emma hadn't managed to take after her in.

Fortunately Rachel never had much time for other people's trips down memory lane either.

"Sound's blocked much better now. The new plants are working."

Emma stumbled at being snapped back to the here and now, then recovered and grinned internally.

"It's funny, I think that their creator would be a little insulted that you doubted her."

"I didn't." Rachel stopped to find words again, "She just goes too far sometimes, remember the sun plants?"

The specifics of that incident had both girls shivering a little, Emma's eyes widening when Rachel broke the silence to continue hesitantly.

"I...I didn't mean that she's no good. She is. I know that"

"No I-I get what you mean, I totally agree." Emma cursed her carelessness internally, searching for words to reassure Rachel that she hadn't been cruel without reminding the other girl of her difficulties, "She would agree about the sun plants too. Our Vine's got an ego about her creations is all."

Rachel grunted agreement as if the awkward moment hadn't happened, already moving on and thinking nothing else of it as she got on with the chores of getting the dogs settled in for the night.

Emma envied her that easy acceptance, and admired it, and hated herself for her envy. One more bit of proof that as fucked up as she might be, Rachel was a much kinder person than her. A person who deserved every piece of luck in Emma's life at least a million times more than she did.

But then, as she told herself every time her thoughts went this way, life just wasn't fair.

That fucking Shadow Stalker was a ward with a secret identity and a trust fund and no need to steal just to protect what she loved, well that was proof enough for her. No justice in the world, or else she and her friends wouldn't be thieves now would they? Which had her wondering about the other friend and her precious cargo.

"Rach? Speaking of Vine have you heard from her? She should have been back with food ages ago."

Before Rachel could respond -or even look up from her inspection of Bullet's teeth- three of Angelica's rolling barks signalled a friend had returned and they'd brought someone with them. Diverting her attention into a flat stare aimed at the door.

The friend's identity was a no-brainer with two of the trio already present. As to the guest, Emma pondered while putting her mask back on, it was probably Grue, meaning they were going to have to watch the two of them making moon eyes at one another through their masks and talking about some new book. Though given Regent had dropped off a letter from his teammate several hours ago Grue stopping by for a chat was odd. It might even mean they'd finally decided to stop beating around the bush and gone on a date.

So when Taylor opened the door, decked out in her usual full body costume of leaves and vines (all of them living, ornate and much tougher than they looked) and already talking up a storm, Emma was ready to make with the teasing until her friend achieved spontaneous combustion.

"Hey guys, you'll never guess what happened while I was getting food -I went with thai food by the way, there's a new place I ended up finding- well I was on my way there when I saw these guys-"

Only to draw up short when her friend was not followed by a familiar mask, or a mask at all.

"-they were dragging her into an alley and it didn't look like anything nice so I figured I'd intervene. No big deal and I made sure to snag their wallets while I was at it. Anyway-"

She tensed and Rachel growled low in her throat at the sight of dirty blonde...hobo, following their friend inside and quietly shutting the door. Looking around with wide eyes while Taylor kept making Emma wonder if she had learned circular breathing when they were younger.

"-she said that they were trying to kidnap her and I couldn't just leave her so we circled the city a few times to shake any tail and then we came here. After stopping for food I mean. Hey did I get a letter?"

The newest person to see their base somehow managed to look scared and cocky at the same time. Her shaking hands and tense posture clashing with a toothy grin that threatened to remove the top of her head. Though she clamped her lips together after a look at Rachel, who looked less than happy with the surprise.

"Who the fuck is she?"

Taylor jerked in place, like she was surprised she hadn't already given them the girl's name.

"Didn't I say? This is Lisa, guys. She's a cape too."

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This was a prompt over on SB/SV

I decided to pick it up and run with it. As you can see things went rather differently in this world. Rachel is a bad influence on her friends' obedience to the law and they're a good influence on her methods and targets. Emma has no idea what a bullet she dodged and plenty idea of how hard Rachel has it to understand her properly.

Taylor heard a different end to that phone call and triggered thinking her last lifeline had just been killed by monsters while useless Taylor was once more just holding a phone in entirely the wrong place and not helping anyone. Cue ability to manipulate, create, sense and modify plants on the fly. She has a decent Tinker rating.

Whatever butterflied Rachel into that Alley also changed Brian's power. His darkness is a little slower and more unwieldy in this AU, but he has a rough sense of those within it and can selectively drain them (leading to harmless loss of consciousness getting progressively closer to coma with time) then use the energy to boost himself. Bulking up in scale with how much he uses and gaining super-strength, -toughness and -regeneration, potentially up to pretty hefty levels.

At this point I doubt I can spell out the inspiration for the powers and title any more clearly without just telling you all outright. Gotham City Sirens, Brian is Bane; Lisa is Oracle, Emma is Harley, Rachel is Catwoman and Taylor is Ivy


	3. House for Sale

Ok, this one will need a bit of a preface.

See while I have a whole lot of ideas for Worm fics (much like every fandom I've gotten into if I'm honest) of those most are only interesting enough to me for a couple snips or so. There were three ideas that I seriously considered for more than that, ideas that I thought could have enough meat to develop entire stories worth their own threads from.

Out of these, I chose two to actually write multi-chapter stories from. Those will be uploading in the months to come. However a challenge on SB to write a story without using Grue made me finally pull out the third idea and actually do something with it.

It's the oldest one, since I've been thinking of it now and then since the interlude it springboards off of was first put up. Though in the end I decided the other two ideas had more to them, were more divergent from canon and were generally more interesting.

In any case without further ado, here is what would have been the prologue to that idea, followed by _an outline_ of the entire story as it might have been. Oh and just to be clear, the character in this is **NOT AN OC**, it's just he never got a civilian name in canon and starting with his cape name felt wrong.

**Story beginning**

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_House for Sale_

_A slip of the wrist might change the world_

Clair Reginport had been "cut" by Brandish's power before. He had been wounded many times, and even without that his power's limitations ensured he was no stranger to pain. Still the magnitude of the blow that swept through his side was enough to push his self-control to new limits.

If his little Amelia had not been so close at hand then he probably wouldn't have bothered strangling the scream rising in his throat. However she was and this was certain to be a bad enough experience for her even without the memory of his cries, it was a small thing but enough to steel his will.

He still bit deep into his cheek as his legs went limp and he tumbled to the ground. His attempt at catching himself against the closet doors was less than successful, mostly just serving to cover it in his blood as he slid down it. Fortunately Brandish's power had some degree of cauterising effect or else he'd be practically empty of blood already.

He reconnected his spine and extended feelers of bone into the wound, doing what he could to stem the blood flow...it wasn't going to be enough.

Already it was a little difficult to focus.

Looking around them room at his final enemies as they licked their own wounds, Clair rather approved of the scene. Several against one they had fought without holding anything back and still nearly lost. It was a fitting end for the Marquis of Brockton Bay.

Then his attention slipped to the closet he was now slumped against and Clair hated himself a little. Not that denying his nature at this point served much purpose.

Movement grabbed at his attention, then froze what little blood he had remaining. Brandish was pulling back for another blow. Fuzzy or not he could see it wasn't aimed at him -which made sense, a mercy blow was not her style but at the hiding place behind him. Behind the blade Brandish's eyes were wide and her pupils barely there. She was lost in some inner place while her body kept fighting.

Thinking back to the origins of his own powers Clair though he might understand. He wondered what demons she was fighting and had not yet slain, what was her East Boston Academy? Who was her Timothy McBale? Would this blow free her of them?

The moment of sympathy passed. She thrust. And Clair found a strength that had nothing to do with the Marquis driving his hand arcing up towards her, the heroine barely leaping back in time to avoid being gutted by the bones emerging from each fingertip.

Unable to resist the theatrics he waggled a finger at her in reproach. His lungs lacked the strength for words but she had snapped out of her haze. A warning was unnecessary, she would peacefully check the closet of her own accord.

Then the support at his back vanished rather abruptly. He found himself very glad of the blankets he had stuffed into the closet to cushion his daughter, since they softend his fall into the hard-floored space. It still hurt like hell, tugging at the massive wound in his abdomen. Distantly it occurred to him that he must smell pretty bad given the wound's location. Proximally it occurred that Amelia must have opened the closet door, no one else was close enough.

That wasn't like her. She was such a good girl normally. So much so that he sometimes worried that she might be afraid of him still, seeing more the stranger of a year past than the father of here and now.

Her face came into view over him, covered in red but with no visible wounds or signs of pain. He still panicked for a moment before the wetness he was lying in registered. He had been bleeding into the closet. Which explained the blood covering her and why she had opened the door.

That stifled scream felt like much less of an achievement now.

His drifting attention came back to the girl. Tiny and perfect, tears cutting tracks in the blood that masked her. She was clearly trying to be brave, like he had told her when he woke her up and carried her in here, but she couldn't hold back the sobs as she clutched at him. Little fists bunched up in his shirt.

Sweet fuck buggery it hurt. Everything stank of copper. He couldn't seem to hear anything. It was bitterly cold. In summary, dying was really not an enjoyable experience. But under his daughter's gaze he had to hold onto his pride. Give her as peaceful a final recollection of him as he could.

For her, for his little Amelia, he did his best to smile.

With one last surge of strength he managed to raise his arm again, letting the blades wither and fall from his fingers. He couldn't quite get his hand to her face, but she bridged the gap. Grabbing his hand and holding it tight to her cheek. He squeezed her fingers and felt so proud of her. So...very...proud.

The world went dark.

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Amelia had only blinked but her daddy wasn't moving at all any more. Neither were all the other people on the floor but she didn't care about them. She wasn't sure what was happening other than how scary it was however she thought they might have been hurting her daddy. They were why he was bleeding everywhere and why he wasn't moving or smiling or holding her hand.

Her daddy had always seemed so much stronger than mummy, like nothing could hurt him or surprise him. He knew everything and he was always happy to explain things. He never even shouted or got scary like mummy sometimes did.

Now he had been hurt and she was covered in his blood and he needed his blood didn't he. If he ran out of it he would stop.

She didn't want him to stop. She grabbed his hand to make him notice her and-

His body unfolded in her mind and she_ understood._

She could feel all of him and if she looked closely at it she could tell how every piece worked together with every other piece. Some of them were really gross. All of them needed blood though and he was nearly out of it. So she told his body to make more.

It was still just leaking back out of him, she set to work fixing that too. It took way longer than it had to make him make more blood but she could do it. She could fix him.

She was just finishing up, fixing the blood making back to normal after she noticed that leaving it as high as she'd put it would hurt her daddy, when a hand fell on her dress at the shoulder and snapped her back to the room. Pulling her away from her daddy.

"Come away girl, you don't need to see this.", said a woman she would normally have thought sounded kind. But that had to be a lie, they'd hurt daddy after all, so she tugged away from the hand and the kind voice. Not even looking at the woman, which daddy had always told her was a very rude thing to do.

Before she could reach daddy another hand grabbed by the wrist this time, a lot less gently. Then the hand was joined by another and she was being picked up by a man in bright clothes. He almost looked like a superhero, but superheroes wouldn't hurt her daddy so that couldn't be right.

"Manpower.", reproached the kind voice.

"We can't just let her stare at a dead man." said her captor. He was lucky she was a polite girl or she would have bitten him for calling her daddy dead. He was a liar and mean and she was glad she had been rude to them, even if a few of them looked like they were hurt now that she looked at them properly.

Had her daddy done all of that? There was a lot of bone scattered around, just like when he put on a puppet show for her birthday. Except a lot of these bits looked sharp.

"What are we going to do with her?" said the man with the bent leg over in the corner, sounding like it really hurt.

"What else? She'll go to child services, now stop talking about it in front of the poor girl."

She didn't care who had said that, it was a horrible thing to say and she didn't like it. She wasn't going any where. She was staying with her daddy and she realised that she needed to tell them.

"No! I want to stay with daddy! Put me down!"

She struggled as much as she could but the man holding her didn't budge. He just held her tightly and made shushed noises at her. Like she was a baby. Her daddy never treated her like that.

So Amelia was very glad when she saw that he was standing up. The men and women around her didn't seem glad at all though, stepping back and starting to look scary.

"I would like my daughter back, if you would be so kind." said daddy as nicely as always. Which made her feel bad for being so rude, even if they were mean he would still want her to be polite.

Before she could say anything though, a woman with a glowing sword stepped in between her and her daddy. All the others stepped up next to her, even the man with the bent leg hopped into place.

"Manpower, get the girl out of here. She shouldn't see this."

Amelia felt cold. There were still going to hurt her daddy after she had only just fixed him. No. No no no no no.

She grabbed the arm holding her and found where the sleeve met his gloves. She had been able to change her daddy when she touched his hands so if she could touch this man's hands then...

His body unfolded in her head just like before. This time she didn't really change anything, she just grabbed the bit in his head that made him sleepy and told it that it was night. He fell to the ground and she slipped easily from his arms. She remembered the blood though and touched him again to make sure that he wouldn't get sick later on from what she did.

Only her daddy had seen her but the man had made a lot of noise when he fell. One of the women turned around and started to yell something but then her daddy was moving and all she could see was a wall of bone. There was a lot of noise and crashing sounds and she felt like she was in an elevator.

Then the bone fell away and she was in the cellar with her daddy standing on his own lump of bone. She'd seem him do the burrowing trick a few times but he'd never done it with her before. It had been a lot of fun.

Amelia decided to show her appreciation properly with biggest hug she could.

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Clair did not waste any time once he made it to the basement, no matter how much he wanted to return his daughter's embrace and sleep for a week. He suspected that whatever power she had used to heal him (and it was definitely her power, unless Manpower had secretly narcoleptic all along) had taken a physical toll on him. However the Brigade weren't stupid and he needed to get out of the perimeter they would no doubt already be setting up.

There were quite a few objects whose loss he would regret, mostly Amelia's possessions, but everything he truly could not afford to lose was in a secure box behind the wine shelving ringing his cellar. Settling her against his shoulder her crossed to the appropriate part of the room. He pulled out the one bottle of real value, set it aside and tipped over the rest of the shelf.

Ignoring the mess and sudden aroma of winery, he spun the safe combination in and tugged it open. Then he carefully disarmed the incendiary device hidden in the compartment roof before tugging out a duffel bag filled with everything he needed to abandon his identity.

Then he walked to the wall, checked his burdens carefully and burrowed off into the dirt. The bottle he left behind. A parting gift for the Brigade and for Clair Reginport.

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The passage of several hours found him in a cheap motel room, cheap wallpaper and bad décor, Amelia sleeping on a bed that he felt honest shame for allowing her near while he used a clean laptop and phone to determine the damage to his holdings. His chair had needed a piece of paper folded up and shoved beneath the back left leg, but was otherwise surprisingly comfortable.

They had frozen his assets of course, which would have been a major problem had he been dumb enough to keep more than token amounts in his real name.

Not to say that he had gotten off without harm, not only had a lot of his more valuable possessions, not least of them his face, belonged to Mr Reginport, but there had been links from that identity to many of his secret accounts. The kind that the PRT's white collar division would be having a lovely time digging through. The only way to survive it had been to severe all compromised data from the rest. Sacrificing what they had their claws into to save the rest.

He was no pauper still, but he was definitely much reduced. The first time the family holdings had been reduced since he took control of them, hopefully not a sign he was inheriting his father's poor fortunes.

He hung up his last call of the evening, the work done and his assets secure. Yet despite an exhaustion he would have called bone deep if he didn't consider puns only marginally superior to toilet humour, he could not bring himself to sleep.

Part of it he knew was the inevitable result of having one's sanctuary violated, he did not feel secure. But he could sleep with one eye open as it were, so that was not it. Not really. The real issue lay on the least objectionable of the two beds and clutched a bone replica of her lost Lord Teddykins. Amelia.

She was the reason he had lost today, it was as simple as that. Even caught by surprise and with his code used against him so blatantly he had still been winning. Hell, they'd still been afraid of him after striking him down, a savage grin spread across his face at the memory of them stepping back when he had stood up fully healed. Though with how much blood he'd been drenched in it was a question as to if they'd even noticed the healing.

Shaking himself out of such gloating he resumed his line of thought.

It was Amelia's presence that forced him to take a wound. For all that she had healed him afterwards, she was a liability. One he clearly could not afford regardless of his desires in the matter. So he would have to find another place for the girl.

A nanny of some sort would be ideal in many regards but required him to place trust in someone that he did not believe himself capable of. That option wasn't one. So maybe an institution instead of an individual? A boarding school of some kind would be perfect.

Yes, somewhere just like East Boston Academy...

"What is wrong with me?" he almost sobbed.

His daughter had nearly been killed. Had certainly been traumatised and had triggered. The scars of this day would echo through her entire life, he knew that very well, and it was no one's fault but his own. He had hurt a child, that it was his own child only made it more unspeakable.

And in the aftermath what did he think of? Preserving his assets might be justifiable for her sake but gloating over his victory? Blaming her for his shortcomings? Considering abandoning her to a place like that? To a place like his own personal hell?

Clair had been called a monster many times. Now for the first time in his life he felt like one.

Crossing to his daughter's side he took her up in his arms and wept. Holding her tight until the morning.

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It had been at least a week but Amelia was still having nightmares. She tried not to tell her daddy about them, especially since he'd made her another teddy after the first time she got upset and them smiled at her despite how much it must have hurt to do it. He thought she didn't know how much it hurt him to use his power, but she did, she knew that she had the bravest daddy in the whole world so she had to brave too.

Somehow he always knew that she was lying about the nightmares though. He'd pretend to believe her and then he'd make her waffles with lots of cream and strawberries and act like it was just a normal breakfast. He was still really strict about brushing her teeth right afterwards though, which was way less fun.

Anyway, ever since they'd had to leave the house they'd been living in smelly hotel rooms instead. The beds weren't very comfortable and her clothes were a lot less soft now, but it wasn't her daddy's fault so she tried not to complain about it too much. It was those horrible people's fault, they were the ones who took away their house and all of her toys and books and her clothes and her bed and Lord Teddykins. They'd even hurt daddy, but she was trying not to think about that because it made her get scared, for daddy more than herself, and then she'd need a hug from daddy to calm down and daddy was super busy all the time now.

She had realised yesterday that she hated them. If she got ahold of them again she'd make them tired and low on blood and see how they liked it. Why her daddy didn't seem more angry at them was confusing, when she asked him he'd said that they didn't do anything wrong and she shouldn't be angry at them but that was silly wasn't it? They'd hurt him and hurting people was wrong, unless they were horrible people who hurt daddies of course, then it was ok.

Daddy had gotten really quiet when she told him that, then he'd ruffled her hair -which he normally never did because she hated it- and told her that she was a good girl but she still shouldn't hurt them with her power.

And her power was amaaaaaazing!

It wasn't just people that she could feel with it, it was anything org- orgam- orgamic? Something like that, anyway as long is it was alive she could feel it and make it different however she liked. She could even feel all these tiny little things on her skin and inside her tummy, too small for her to see with her eyes, and some of them were bad so her power made them dead without her even thinking about it. The good ones were fine though, they were cool to feel while they did nice things for her body. Even if it was a bit gross it was a cool kind of gross.

Her daddy had spent ages talking to her after she told him more about her power. Some of it was about simple stuff like how she had to keep it hidden from people, but most was about all the things that she had to be careful of with it. Which she'd thought was silly until her daddy told her that he had to do the same thing with his power only she hadn't believed him so he'd taken her into the bathroom and held and hand over the bath and then his hand had exploded and...well she was pretty sure she'd started screaming.

Mostly she just remembered getting really scared and all she had been able to think about was the closet and having her daddy's blood all over her and...she'd calmed down eventually, with her daddy holding her close and stroking her hair, the both of them safely encased in a little cocoon of bone. He'd been fine and she'd felt stupid no matter how many times he told her that it was his fault and she'd done nothing wrong. Then he'd sat down with her on the beds and told her how his powers meant that he hurt himself when he made mistakes, but that her powers would probably be the opposite.

That she had to be really careful with the tiny little things most of all, because they were what made people sick, sometimes just a little but other times they could make people really really sick...like mummy had been. So she had to be very careful that she didn't make any changes that she couldn't undo, or make anything that would be able to make more of itself and get out of her control that way.

She'd listened harder than she'd ever listened to anything ever before.

Not that it made her power any less awesome that she had to be careful with it. She'd made all kinds of pretty looking plants so far, though she had to be careful not leave any of them where someone other than her and her daddy might find them. She had even thought about making herself a pet, but daddy had said she couldn't, because she had to learn more first and because pets were a lot of responsibility. So for now she was just making pretty flowers to live inside of her new Lord Teddykins, since being made out of bone meant she could use her power on him as long as she made she to keep the bone from dying completely.

Now though, now there was a scary thing she had to do with her power. Something her dad had asked her about and she kinda wished she hadn't agreed to because it was really really scary.

Her daddy had told her the morning after the bad people attacked them that he was going to leave his job. That he didn't want to do what he'd been doing any more so he was going to take all his money and things and pay his employees one last time and then he'd do something else. Starting with spending more time taking care of her more for a while.

She'd thought that it was great news, but he'd told her that there were bad parts as well. That the people who had attacked him knew what he looked like now and they would keep attacking him unless he changed his name -so he was going to be using mommy's last name too from now on, which made her happy- and also made himself look different. Which she'd thought was fine because daddy used his powers on himself all the time, but then he'd said something about bone structures not being enough and that she had to change him too.

Which was super scary. It wasn't like making him better where she was just putting things back to how they wanted to be, she'd be changing him completely. What if she messed up? What if she forgot what he looked like for real? What if she hurt him?

Daddy had said it would be ok though, then he'd had another sit down with her and talked about things that might go wrong and things she shouldn't do to people unless she wanted to hurt them; like changing their tiny things, or changing their brain because that was where people kept their minds and changing it would be like making the person change. It had made her feel better...but it was still scary.

Her daddy trusted her though, and if she didn't do it the bad people would find them.

When her daddy said it was time, they were in a really really smelly hotel this time but he said it would be the last one and then they'd have a little house all of their own, he'd sat her on one bed and sat down on the floor in front of her and then his face had gone all wobbly.

When it was done he was the same, and also not. She could still see her daddy's face but it was thicker in some places and thinner in others. However she could see now why he needed her help as well because his skin was all either stretched out or bunched up and it looked really sore. She'd been quick to touch his cheek and start put ting things how they should be, which hadn't taken long.

Then he'd said it was time and they'd started changing more stuff. It had been more fun then she had expected, like trying on pretty new clothes. They'd changed his eye colour (it was green now) and made his hair red (after she made it pink and they'd both laughed a lot) and made his nose a little thicker too. He said it looked nicer now but she wasn't so sure and she was glad he still sounded the same, it would have been kinda scary if he hadn't. Like her daddy had been replaced with a stranger.

She'd said as much and he'd hugged her and it'd all been ok. Only her daddy could give hugs like that, or read her stories with all the different voices like he did afterwards.

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The next day they'd packed their things and gotten into the car.

They'd driven what she thought was a really long way, but since she kept falling asleep Amelia wasn't sure. It might have only been a little ways.

Anyway, when they stopped it was on a quiet street full of lots of little houses that all looked kind of the same. Her daddy had gotten out of the car, saying that her had to finalise some paper stuff, then she'd been left to stare out at all the houses.

She'd thought of the big house that they used to live in, it was tons bigger...but it had just been her and her daddy there. Before she lived there she had lived in a tiny little house (one in a building full of other houses like it) with her mummy, until mummy had gotten sick and, and died and she'd gone to live with daddy instead. Her daddy had been scary at first because she didn't know that he was the best daddy in the whole world yet, but even after she knew that their big house had still been scary sometimes. Like it was too big for just the two of them.

Amelia nodded to herself, one of these houses would do just right for them.

Then she spent what must have been hours just sitting in the car being really really really super mega boooooored!

Finally her daddy had come back and let her out and she'd gotten to run out and into the new house and see what it was like, except it was just empty. There was no furniture and all the walls were white and it just looked like a bunch of big empty boxes inside. Her daddy had laughed when she told him that and said that all the furniture would get there later that day so she would just have to be patient until then.

It had been a very boring day. Especially since her daddy said she couldn't play with the flowers in the back garden until they got taller fences and even then she would have to be careful no one saw her. So all she could do was play with Lord Teddykins inside, she did have some fun after she worked out how to make him bouncy and threw him at the walls of what was going to be her room. Daddy hadn't even gotten annoyed about it when he came in and found her mid throw.

They'd ended up playing catch, but bouncing Teddykins off the walls instead of just throwing him. It had been kind of hard since he kept bouncing in weird ways, then they'd heard a big truck outside and they'd had to stop.

She'd made sure to apologise to Lord Teddykins, but he'd forgive her for the indiginity since she'd had fun.

She'd been watching the men daddy hired to move all their things inside, daddy was helping them move things and smiling and laughing with them, but she'd gotten shy and hidden behind the tree in front of their house. Then a car had pulled up to the house behind her and she'd been trapped. She couldn't hide from both sides behind one tree after all.

She'd just decided to hide from the car instead of the moving men, when it opened and a man and a woman and another little girl had all gotten out.

The man and the woman had gone to talk to her daddy, and it looked like they knew the moving men as well but then she'd been distracted trying to keep the tree between her and the little girl who was running at her and looking less little with every step she took towards her.

She failed, the girl pretended to run one way and then ran the other and she fallen back with surprise at seeing her right in front of her.

Before she could get upset about the fall though the other little girl had distracted her by holding out a hand to help her up, only to suddenly start acting shy. Apologising very quietly for knocking her down and sounding really sorry.

"It's ok, I was just surprised is all." Amelia said, trying to make the weird girl feel better; "I'm Amelia, Amelia Lavere."

The girl with long curly black hair had stopped hiding behind it and smiled at her.

"Hello Amelia, I'm Taylor Hebert."

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**story end**

**outline begin**

So what would have happened next had this continued? Well:

_Marquis'/Danny's POV_

After they first get talking in that initial meeting Marquis is surprised to end up befriending Danny. He decides to take a risk and using his remaining wealth (it's extensive) invests heavily in trying to reinvigorate the docks, inspired by Danny's total commitment to the area. This works to some extent, but results in a parahuman crackdown by the gangs, who don't want to see that kind of thing ruining their playground. Danny triggers in the resultant mess.

Thoroughly disillusioned by the Protectorate response to the wrecking of the Docks (it's underwhelming) Danny is approached by Marquis, who was at the conflict and felt him trigger. Marquis tells him the truth about who he is and what he did to finance the resurgence, as well as why he's changed his ways. After a time in which he feels betrayed and disgusted and it looks like their friendship is over Danny agrees to work with him to try and find a way to fix things.

Danny triggered with Queen Administrator, only in the first step in a very surprising event in the cycle it gave him an unprecedented power (in universe, in fanfiction there's plenty of precedent) that very much changed his situation. Namely the power from Manager. Allowing him to swap powers between people, combine them, stake them, use them himself and generally break the game in all manner of ways. The flavour and specifics would be different from Manager.

Since he's not an idiot he passed this off in public as the power to enhance powers and modify them to improve synergy. Basically acting like Ingénue if she wasn't crazy.

They work in the shadows for a little over two months before hearing about a Tinker that inspires a crazy plan.

A bud of Haywire, the girl was selling her gear as storage tech when she got inducted into a large gang up north. Rumours reached the bay and Marquis and "Union" hit the gang hard. Danny was a pretty naturally talented cape, and fairly terrifying in action. They took the girl back and asked her to try something with them. As in genuinely asked, she was grateful for the rescue and agree, but they didn't coerce her.

Within a year and a half of Marquis arriving next door, Danny is setting up a co-operative involving the Dockworkers Association as it's seed and heavily protected against usurpation or corruption. It rents land to a rogue tinker who proceeds to open portals to seven different Earths on the seven very well positioned patches of land. Brockton is revived and despite a lot of pressure from both legal and illegal corners, they manage to retain legal and binding ownership of the land.

So The Association comes into being. The controlling power of the Bay of Doors. Emergent from the unions and having absorbed other groups as they grew.

They amount to lawful neutral anarchists. A large power block that enforces and maintains the Bay's independence while operating on a genuinely flat structure. However they were still coming into being at this point, aided rather a lot by having Danny.

Several capes appear on the Association's side seemingly by luck but actually due to Danny empowering the people he trusts most. This includes both Kurt and Lacey.

Marquis gains several power boosts from Danny; the ability to create semi-independent bone minions with remote viewing capabilities, a danger sense with associated ability to toughen his bone structure and a very powerful boost to his regeneration ability. He's a serious threat by the end of all this.

He changes his cape name to Assembly as a way to honour his friend's beliefs in equality and cooperation.

Unfortunately at the same time as all this the Bay is also hit by massively more attention from the world, and filled with pre-existing gangs not even slightly happy about things. The Portal Tinker is killed and as far as anyone knows Danny is dead as well.

[spoiler]Actually Cauldron took him and tried to take the Tinker as well but due to being caught off guard by Danny's power they were unable to save her. [/spoiler]

So Annette is the single parent this time. Marquis does everything he can to honour the memory of his respected friend, including keeping an eye on his daughter. Annette's opinion of the Association is positive but she's still angry at Marquis in many ways.

In the end the Association still comes out on top, all other criminal groups retain at best a minor stake in the edges of the Bay. The E88 in particular are wiped out completely.

_End Marquis'/Danny's POV_

**Timeskip to about 2011**

_Amy's/Emma's POV/others_

So we come up on the present day.

The Association have come to be a fairly benign group and the main organised criminal enterprise at the same time, they try to reduce crime while holding firm control of what crime there is. They don't tend to tolerate people fucking around in their territory above a very minor level. The capes do not control the Association, nor do they profit from it all that much more than anyone else. Marquis has a day job and lives fairly humbly. He is happy this way, having taken quite a lot from the experience of having his mansion door kicked in and nearly losing his daughter.

They expanded their ranks over the years, with one very important cape mentioned further down having cemented their power. Their structure remains the same despite the large number of capes in their employ, most of them rogues and tinkers taking advantage of the portal worlds for various enterprises.

Some degree of colonisation has occurred in the other Earths, though it is limited by negotiations with the portals. Since other countries are also very interested, there is a lot of international attention on the Bay.

Shit between the Association and the government is cold war-esque. Lots of espionage and not much open conflict.

Amy and Taylor are somewhat in the role of Mafia princess. At least thematically. They were comfortable, not spoilt, since both their families opted not to take advantage of their situation to become obscenely wealthy. Not to say they, like most higher-ups in the Association, are not well taken care of. Just not living in mansions kind of money.

Obviously they grew up as childhood friends, their dads were close friends after all. The third member of this little trio being Emma.

But that's all just the background, the story is Amy and her life as a rogue healer/occasional vigilante.

Obviously over the years she figured out/was told that her dad used to be a supervillain. She ended up letting go of much of her grudge against the Brigade, especially after they got one of the shorter ends of the many sticks involved in the Association's rise.

Specifically the death throes of the E88, which killed both Carol and Mark Dallon and led the remaining members of the brigade to splinter. It also maimed Crystal Pelham (Laserdream) by the loss of both her legs.

This was the spur to Amy's first act as a heroic healer, when she snuck out against her father's wishes and made her way to Crystal's side to heal her. Obviously she did so in a full costume and mask.

While her father was angry at the risk she took at a very dangerous time, he was aware enough of his daughter and capes in general to stick more to limiting her than outright telling her no. As a result Amy has grown up healing behind a mask, gaining a serious reputation for it, but is a lot more eager to do more due to feeling like her dad has been holding her back too much.

As hinted in the prologue, part of this involves her taking much more of an interest in creating cures and eliminating diseases entirely, rather than her canon obsession with personally healing people. Again this is due to her dad holding her back, since she couldn't heal people in person all the time she spent more time thinking on how to do it without personally being with the patient. Think Firefly's Amy.

The story from her POV would start with her sixteenth birthday, which is the point at which her father agreed to give her more freedom as a cape including allowing her to go out without displaying any ties to the Association. She's been sneaking out since long before that, but this is when she can really introduce herself to the world.

Which is as far as I have thought out the central plot. I have ideas beyond this point but as I said, I opted to focus on other stuff.

_Here's what I do have:_

**Emma;** never got hurt as the Barnes are also close friends to the Heberts (enough to name their first daughter after Annette and name the Heberts her godparents) and became heavily attached to the Association. Alan is in a completely different law practice and speciality. Both closely tied to them.

**Victoria;** lost both parents in the death throes of the Empire Eighty-Eight. This lead her to become an anti-hero vigilante who lives and operates alone. a massive lawsuit for excessive force hurt her financially and drove the rest of New Wave (basically her aunt and cousins at that point) to give her the boot while leaving the Bay behind them. She is at odds with the Association and barely avoiding them coming crashing down on her.

**Lisa;** had her canon backstory then fled straight for the Bay. Since her parents lack the influence to reach her there she has started work as a masked investigator. Pretty much a PI, while her civilian identity works odd jobs around the place.

**Coil;** stayed well clear of the Bay. Because he's not a moron.

**Theo;** went into care after the E88 fell, with no family left to pass on their hate to him. He ends up being rather ashamed of them once he learns the truth about them, he's a lot happier as an orphan.

**Dean;** his family were smart enough to get in while the getting was good and are associated with the Association. After he triggered due to them being pretty dickish towards him he ended up an association cape, he is fairly in love with Glory Girl, who hates him by association with the Association (can you tell I like making puns with this name?) who she really really hates.

**Taylor;** triggers as _**Renaissance**_, able to impart roles to herself and to others, each consisting of a package of skills, knowledge and minor powers that make them extremely suited for the role. No ratings above 1 or 2 but she can spam them given it only takes her a minute or so to impart a role.

This is far from her true power, she can actually impart major cape abilities as well. However she has no idea this is the case. What she is really doing is granting Thinker and Changer powers specific to the roles she creates.

She does this because of the other part of that very surprising event mentioned above. Her power is a true bud, a new shard that emerged by hilarious chance and is -simply put- the answer to the cycle. It can create new simulated shards (hence ability to grant powers) but these shards do not physically exist. This works via lots of jargon involving energy forms and folded dimensional pockets but the effect is powers with no energy cost. Not in any world. Even the base shard draws its energy and position from simulated shards and thus has no real-space space or energy costs.

Downside is that roles also effect personality and subtly alter perceptions both of the present and of memories. These effects can become permanent with too much time (more than a day straight) in a role and make it very unpleasant to hold multiple contrasting roles in a short period. She utilises this power via a position in The Association.

She is of great importance to them and is kept extremely well protected. Not only is she a hell of a force multiplier, she is also the main reason that Cauldron is staying very very hands off. Where her father was a fuzzy spot for PtV, Taylor is a total blank spot for precog in general. Not only does it not work on her, it doesn't work on things near her or that interact with her. This being due to her shard's nature.

Taylor herself is a lot cheerier than canon, but is fairly sheltered and desperate to get some time outside of the safe places the association let's her go. Desperate enough that discussion leads to a search for a bodyguard to go with her so that she can indeed go out as a cape.

**Brian;** triggers as in canon, but unlike canon there's this huge great cape organisation that gives it's members benefits, life insurance and legitimate jobs and so forth as standard. He catches Kurt's eye while joining and after a number of subtle tests that he manages to pass, culminating in a much less subtle one, he ends up as Taylor's bodyguard.

I would guess some of those reading this are now thinking, of course they would have ended up going the bodyguard crush route and romance happening. Those people would be completely correct. Wuv is in the air.

_Stuff that would happen:_

Amy meets Lisa in her civilian identity. She develops a crush. Amy meets Glory Girl in her cape identity. She develops a crush. Can you say Love Triangle?

At some point Danny pulls a break out from Cauldron and plot kicks off explosively with his return to the Association. Resulting in Cauldron pursuing and things going hot between the PRT and the Association.

There would be an apparent crisis where it seems like some group are in position to murder Annette and the kids cannot save her. This would lead to the reveal that Annette was a cape, a major enforcer for Lustrum before she became disillusioned. She was also one of the three people Danny boosted the most (the others being himself and Marquis) before he vanished.

She does not get involved with the Association because her split from Lustrum had some very bad PR and she fears what her cape persona's reputation would do to the group, but could not bring herself to change powers entirely.


	4. A Whole New World

This is not a message, it's just to deal with the offset.

This too.

_A Whole New World_

_This was definitely not Taylor's bed_

Holy crap what a headache.

I hadn't felt this shit since the morning after my seventeenth birthday, so it was a fairly good bet that Alec and Aisha had decided to play brewmaster again. Whatever the fuck had happened I was pretty sure that murdering my future sister-in-law was going to be required in retribution for it. Or at least hurting her a lot.

For now I opted to shut the world out until it stopped hurting so much, or until the alarm announced that I needed to get dressed and go to my morning lecture...except there was no morning lecture on Fridays. Was it Friday? The alarm would have the date but another pulse of agony convinced me to check later.

It wasn't just pain either. I felt cold as well. Except cold wasn't the right word, I didn't feel hot but there was also no cold. Numbness? But I didn't feel numb either. I didn't feel anything.

I ignored the pain and martialled my attention, there was nothing. No soft bed, no warm body against mine, no breeze from the window that I always opened on summer nights. In fact now that I was searching for sensation rather than ignoring it, it wasn't just touch that was absent. The world was utterly silent, from the drone of traffic to the sound of my heartbeat. It was all gone.

A deep breath I couldn't feel or hear brought none of the scents I associated with our bedroom, or any other smells for that matter and when I tried to slam my eyes open in panic the world remained as lightless as before.

Total sensory deprivation. True sensory deprivation, not the comforting mute of Brian's darkness, this was an actual absence of sensory input. I was blind, deaf, number than numb and down several other senses besides. Even my bugs were gone and the moment I noticed that I had no idea how I hadn't noticed sooner even through the pain that still throbbed from...somewhere.

Only now did I realise that I lacked any context to determine if it was really coming from my head. Did I even have a head? Was I just a brain in a jar...oh no.

Memories were coming back now and a disturbing number of them featured The Slaughterhouse however-many-psychos-they-had-to-hand. There'd been an attack, we'd been called in to help but the plan had contradicted such a thing. We knew that it wasn't the nine that ended things and we'd focused on the real threat instead.

Which was fuzzy recall at best, but did at least suggest I hadn't ended up in Bonesaw's clutches. Had the real threat done this to me? What even was the real threat? And the plan? It was all so vague and jumbled up...alright, from the top.

I became a cape. I ended up a villain. My friends and I took over the Bay. That was all clear. And after that.

Coil killed Dinah. I killed Coil. We all killed Noelle. I was still clear but it was years ago wasn't it? Yes, about two and half years ago. We'd been ruling the Bay ever since. Dealing with three different PRT directors before things had finally calmed down. Going back to school, I'd just moved on to college a few...months ago? A year?

I cast out for a memory that would give me some context. My seventeenth birthday and the punch that was more vodka than fruit juice. Well my birthday was in June, so had I had an eighteenth birthday? Yes! Yes I definitely remembered one of those because that had been...

That had been when Brian proposed. A quiet evening together leading up to him going down on one knee with a smile like it was the easiest thing in the world. I'd been so surprised that it must have taken more than a minute for me to respond but he hadn't said a word, hadn't moved an inch. Just given me the choice and trusted me completely.

It's a nice memory, there's a lot of those in the last few years but this one in particular stood out above all the shit and pain that life kept throwing my way. This was one of the ones that made me glad to have kept going.

The clarity spread out from there, sweeping the fog spread

We'd learned of the threat that Scion posed by way of an extensive series of connections grown out of Coil's infrastructure. It had been months since we took over, though things had not quite settled down for us. The world was in far too much chaos for that. Then the situation had been made infinitely, or we'd discovered had bad it had always been.

The discovery had been terrifying beyond belief, like being an ant learning of an oncoming flood. Our portal bolt hole would not save us. We couldn't fight back. It had seemed like I'd just started to live again and it was all going to be taken away.

Lisa had been the one to rally us. The one who devised the first seed of the plan...our plan to beat Scion...we'd...we'd done something...really complicated...and a little dumb. Or a lot dumb.

There was a particularly clear memory of a golden figure floating high above us, of resignation and kind of relief along with it. We'd all made it that far, far enough to see the end together. A hand had reached for mine, I'd clasped it and reached out to the next of my friends. Then there was a light that consumed everything.

So the plan, whatever it had actually been, had failed. So why didn't I seem to be dead? Had Scion decided not to kill us in the end?

I abandoned that line of thinking, it wasn't going to go anywhere anytime soon. Better to focus on things I might actually be able to figure out. Which brought me back to the sense issue. Which didn't add up.

I could understand losing my normal senses, I had first hand experience even. But my power should still be there. It was too resilient to just be cut out of me, at least not without killing me in the process. Not even Bonesaw had been able to strip me of those senses.

So maybe I hadn't lost the sense at all, maybe there just weren't any bugs nearby for me to sense. If that were the case, and the alternatives didn't bear thinking about, then I had little other option than to focus on that sense and wait for something to come into range. Even if this headache or bodyache or whatever it was just wouldn't damn well stop!

I couldn't even vent the pain with some good old-fashioned violence, you don't appreciate being able to stub your toe and make a legion of bugs swarm the obstacle until you were reduced to a brain in a jar. Not that I wouldn't be willing to try as a jar brain, maybe I could carry myself around with my swarm? Make a swarm clone around it like that guy in the turtle cartoon?

Maybe I'd be able to have less ridiculous thoughts if the pain would stop!

I sent out my frustration in a wave that would have manifested violently if I still had any bugs. Except rather than making a lot of spiders make obscene gestures, I felt something else respond ever so slightly, something that wasn't a bug. Something that seemed to be inside where I thought my body would be. Which brought my thoughts swinging right back around to Bonesaw.

Well at least I didn't have to worry about hyperventilating.

Once I was done screaming internally I focused on the feeling. Not that it was much of a feeling, but it was there. A whisper of something.

I pressed down on it without a moment's hesitation. The pain vanished as the world bloomed back into being around me. My body returned, I could see and hear and smell and feel, from a great many more perspectives than just my face. Also my body was as familiar as a marble statue and in the process of dissolving into not-bugs.

They seemed like bugs in every way, my control of them, my awareness of their structure and functions, their tiny size and even their appearance. Except I knew an awful lot about bugs from my time as a supervillain, and these were not bugs. The shapes might look right but they were subtly bizarre and alien. Their bodies felt tough in a way no real bug I'd ever found could be. Most abnormal of all were the abilities I could feel in each of them.

This one could slowly weave webbing that resembled razor wire.

This one could secrete tiny quantities of some kind of super adhesive.

These ones could produce and mimic sounds of an enormous variety.

These ones could realise some kind of aerosol poison.

The list just went on. No individual bug had any real power, I doubt they could beat a single person in a straight fight...but there were a hell of a lot of them. With a thought I added more to that number, most just more of the same random assortment of abilities but a single one of my additions had the power I had purposefully and consciously chosen. The ability to make droplets of an extremely powerful corrosive agent.

Meanwhile my senses had sharpened further as I released more of them. As arbitrary and bizarre as it was for that to effect not only the not-bugs' senses but those of my body as well. Well it's not like powers being weird was anything new.

All of which made for a great distraction from my body. Which wasn't. Wasn't mine that is.

Oh sure, the face looked like me if I'd removed every imperfection that had made fifteen year old me think she was hideous, then added a bunch of weird spindly spiderleg looking things coming out from under my hair and laid a terrifying pair of complex mandibles on either side of my mouth. The hair was still entirely mine, black and wavy and extremely well combed, though tumbling past my waist was a lot longer than I had ever been able to get it. My figure was as slender and lacking in real curves as ever, I guess it took more than a complete body swap for Taylor Hebert to get some real actual tits.

The familiarities ended there. In spectacular fashion that I could observe from every possible angle.

While I wasn't wearing any clothes (barely dinged the creepyness meter by this point) my abundance of hair covered me enough that I had to part it to see the details of my new body. Godiva hair did help to hide the lack of chest though, there were some very slight positives here. Everything other than my hair was a mix of colours and subtle patterns that put me in mind of my costume designs after Sabah had started teaching me about camouflage. Except infinitely better and constantly shifting, even with my many views it felt like I could lose sight of myself in a moment's inattention. The effect might have been beautiful but my shape made it closer to pant-shittingly scary.

I was roughly the same build as before from neck down to hips, slender and lean with muscle definition that I had been very proud of now exaggerated to "Olympic gymnast who grates cheese on their abs" kinds of levels. My biceps in particular stood out, not because they were grotesquely huge or anything, just because I now had six of them.

I had the normal pair of arms coming from my shoulders, only made bizarre by the extra finger on each delicately tapered hand. Then emerging from beneath those, pretty much immediately below my armpits, were a much less friendly looking pair of limbs. Similar in form, but with an additional joint and fingers tipped in very pointy claws. The final pair came out of my shoulder blades and there was nothing human about those, long enough to touch the ground at full extension, they had three "elbows" each of which rotated freely in every direction and were both tipped with a set of claws that looked fit to shred steel and crush concrete to dust.

Moving all of my arms separately or together felt impossibly natural. Which failed to scare me because what was beneath my waist did a far better job of it.

At the hips my resemblance to a human vanished, to be replaced by the kind of centaur that arachnophobes have nightmares about. Actually the kind that anyone would have nightmares about really, as much as I was wished I looked as cuddly and unthreatening as a mere drider.

The nerdy reference reminded me of my friends and the campaign of Crypts and Kobolds we were probably never going to finish. Which was an absurdly painful thought, enough so as to make me focus on being a monster instead.

The centaur comparison was an apt one, my upper body and torso emerged from the front section of large -making me even taller now- body with more legs than a...thing with lots of legs. Rather than resembling a spider or a beetle or a scorpion, it had elements of those and a dozen other bugs I could think of. All mixed together with the same alien design that could be seen in my not-bugs.

Despite being symmetrical and not particularly ugly, the overall effect was of chaos. It looked like the personification of my swarms, past and current. Put together with more mind to utility than anything else, limbs for grasping and moving and smashing and carrying, tied together by temporary convenience rather than any permanence. Struck by inspiration at that thought I pushed several of my lower limbs to dissolve into swarm then pulling them back in to find they did not reform in the same shape. An equally quick test finished the thought.

My upper body took effort to make into swarm and came back together looking identical. My lower body was the opposite, dissolving so easily that I wondered if it was really just a lot of not-bugs holding together in a certain shape.

I'm not sure how long I stared at myself. I'd never exactly been vain but this was every single kind of bizarre. It wasn't until I finally had the thought to stop feeling sorry for myself and check out my powers that I took any notice of my surroundings. Letting my swarm that was also me -and didn't that have some worrying implications for my tactics- spread out to get the kind of sense of my surroundings that I had always wanted from my power. I'll admit, seeing from a thousand views at once was pretty cool. Though it did turn out that I was still nearsighted, dissolving most of my lower body gave my senses enough of a boost to let me see my surroundings clearly.

Which could be summed up as crystals. Crystals everywhere. It was like someone had built a three dimensional maze out of the most new age building material they could think of. Only it looked like the whole thing had grown up naturally, meaning it was definitely a parahuman power involved.

Hoping that whoever it was was still around, so I could beat them until my real body came out, I started exploring.

It was tricky finding a good mix between having enough lower body to move quickly and enough swarm to feel like I had a good coverage. Especially since I was too nervous about having bits of myself wander off to really test my range. Given the sheer area I covered with my swarm at any one time and that I was careful to mark where I had been, it was impressive how quickly I got hopelessly lost.

It wasn't even like everything looked the same. There was just so damn much of it. Ranging across every type of environment I could imagine making out of crystals. Huge chambers with ceilings out of sight, down to winding corridors far too small to fit her main body into. Closed rooms that glittered with refracted light opened into places without a roof to block off the blue sky and beaming sun. Crystal forests butted onto crystal desert shared a wall with a solid block that must have been a mile high.

The day waned and ended and I stopped for the night. Not because I was tired or hungry, no. It was the stars that stopped me in my tracks. Driving me to settle my body down and turn as much of myself to swarm as I dared.

There were more stars than I had ever come close to imagining. It was beautiful in a way that made even me wonder how words could ever be enough. That broke my heart because I was alone and things like this were meant to be shared.

Then the stars vanished behind the brilliance of a beacon bright enough to shame the sun, reflected off the crystals the light only multiplied further and further. So I was grateful for my new body in as much as my old one would have been clutching her burnt out eyes on the floor rather than staring right at the light. It was bright, sure, but it wasn't uncomfortable.

Then right when I was about to turn my eyes away, the pure light was replaced with a series of flashes. Two short, three long, two short, one long and then repeating. It was the rendezvous code, rendered in light instead of beeping.

Every one of my swarm unable to keep up with me was pulled back into a body made purely for speed. I was running towards the signal like a freight train before it finished the third repetition. Not that it stopped any time soon, continuing to light up every weird room or area I rushed through.

Of course I was smashing through delicate crystal everything in the process, but getting there quickly was far more important. Even at full speed it felt like most of an hour before I burst through a wall of crystal spires and found myself in an area that put all the others to shame for weird as fuck locations.

It was a clearing amid the forest of crystal spires that towered into the sky, but what made it stand out was the first sight of something other than crystal since I got here.

In the centre of the clearing was a huge pile of dark, fleshy looking coils. The height rapidly dropped off away from the centre but the coils radiated out in a thick carpet, every one of them tapering off to a thin point, the very edges of the coils brushed the outer area of the clearing.

There was no sign of whatever had projected the signal. Nor any trace of my friends.

For lack of anything else to do, I decided to clamber up the pile and mope on top of it. Which seemed fairly well justified to me, the worldest dumbest hero had killed everyone I loved, destroyed my home and turned me into a monster. Now someone was actively screwing with me using their memory. It seemed worth moping abo-

My scouts in the air clearly saw the single tendril that lifted from the ground and flowered, for lack of a better term. The tip peeling back to reveal a glowing core that I was jumping my main body away from even as it swivelled to point my way.

I soared through the air to land on one of the thicker spires, digging in with feet and hands that pulverised the crystal readily. The bright pink laser that had shot out of the single tendril missed completely.

Then every other tendril in the clearing flowered.

I didn't hesitate, the experience of two and a half years sang in my veins and had me bursting apart into a cloud of minions before the first laser made my spire chime. The sound was strange but I ignored the noise and focused on dodging through the storm of attacks.

Storm was the word, the tendrils lashed and whirled and fired almost constantly in a technicolour hail that set the crystal tori going and shattering all around us. I couldn't uneven begin to track them as the pulled back and burst forth from the central lump, itself now a writhing mass. Even with flight, dodging through it all would have been an impossibility in my full body. As a swarm however, it was another matter entirely.

I was every piece of myself equally, no longer bound to a single precious core. I split apart and kept a watch on every part of me with every other part of me. It made dodging most of the fire practically effortless. Most of it.

Amongst the random storm of lasers, eminating from limbs that lashed around blindly, there were other shots, shots with devastating precision. The sources of these moved with purposeful grace and accuracy, each shot from them striking home in my swarm or driving me into ever worse positions. Often they would hide from my many views until the moment they fired, then in the very next moment they would go right back to the same random fire as all the rest. Like the guiding intelligence was just forgetting about them.

I dismissed the whys. It was clear that I was being beaten. Slowly but surely, every member of my swarm that was hit went down stunned. I had tried to sneak bugs down to bind and restrict the tendrils but they were quickly ensnared and shot. I needed a distraction.

Fortunately the fate of all those crystals on my way here suggested pretty clearly that this new body was tough. Time to take advantage of it.

It took a little time to get enough of me into position and I could see my opponent shifting in response to my condensing swarm. The beauty of this plan though, was that it didn't matter if it was seen coming.

Then I saw my opening, had one bug reverse direction to head straight for the central pile, and slammed every other bug I could into that central one. My body reformed in an eyeblink, the fire that slammed into me stung with as many variations as there were beams but it was ineffective. Even as tendrils twisted together and their glowing tips came together even brighter, I was already past their widened firing arcs and headed for the centre.

The pile came closer and closer, then when I was a mere dozen or so feet from it with every limb ready to strike at it, the blasting stopped cold and it exploded.

Tentacles went flying away from it and yet every last one missed me. The pile was revealed to be mostly composed of a single great sphere of spiralling tendrils, from the bottom of which emerged all of the others. Then the sphere opened up too, its spiral pattern twisting apart into limbs shorter and thicker than all the others. Revealing what lay within.

I jerked my arms back out of the way, letting my lower half fall apart instead of using it to rake and tear. My desperate movements proved just enough to spare Lisa from being gutted when she caught me.

The two years since we met had filled out my friend's figure but not given her much more in the way of height. So it was a good thing I'd ditched my legs or her attempt at catching me would have been a bit embarrassing all round. Since I wasn't distracted with figuring out how to kneel with two dozen legs at once, I could focus all my attention on hugging her like we hadn't seen each other in years.

She stood on a smooth white orb that appeared to be the true core of the tentacled blaster beast, wearing casual clothes and the same old smile. She held my weight easily with arms that felt very very unlike how they appeared. Not to mention that she'd just appeared inside a giant monster wearing a T-shirt that I was pretty sure got ruined during Lily's paintball rampage of twenty twelve, that was a warning bell right there.

It must have shown because I was bracing to attack when she smoothly leant in and spoke in the smuggest tones I've ever heard from her, which was saying a lot.

"Pineapple custard."

Apparently this body could turn red better than any human could. That reminder had me glowing like the nose of a certain reindeer.

"...well you're either Lisa or a Thinker strong enough that I'll never be able to figure it out."

She grinned, "I could always recount the rest of that tale, if you're not sure." She drew out the 'u' of 'sure', as if she could prolong my embarrassment just by not finishing the sentence. Which was true, but horribly unfair and I was more than a little tempted to pinch her in retaliat-

"I'm not sure that pinching will do much to me."

She couldn't possib-

"Yep, I can read minds now. And that's not a very nice word that you're thinking Taylor."

No way, that was beyond unfair. I get some special bugs with a freaky body and she gets a completely new power with no changes to her looks? I call bullshit. Shenanig-

"Shenanigans?"

I let my full body reform and stepped back to look down on her, it was tricky finding footing on the mess of tendrils at the edge of the core, but I wasn't going to give her a hug if she was going to be mea-

"M-" she cut herself off; "Sorry, you're right about that being a bit much. Also it's a complete lie. I can't read minds at all."

I didn't fall for her apologetic look, I'd seen it far too many times by now. Lisa only looked apologetic when she wasn't. Crossing all six of my arms I kept glowering down at her.

"My power's been boosted through the stratosphere," she continued despite me; "I can follow so many lines at once now...It's incredible Taylor. Like I just think about something and I know all about it."

I kept the glare up.

"Plus I'm not just a pretty face any more." a strange note of bitterness crept into her voice and I finally noticed that the voice wasn't actually coming from her mouth, while she kept on talking; "I've got enough firepower to take on Legend himself. Pew pew." Her sound effects were punctuated by the firing of two bursts from a few dozen tendrils all bundled up together behind me. The blasts were a dozen feet thick and blue and angled up to burn through the top of one of the spires. The hole it left behind was clean, though the bundle dimmed significantly after firing. None of which was what interested me.

"You were controlling these things? Why the hell did you attack me?!"

She had the nerve to look affronted at my question, "I wasn't attacking you Taylor, I was trying to talk to you and you panicked and I got a bit caught up in things is all."

"You could have killed me!"

Caught up in my anger I didn't take any notice that one of the tendrils, her tendrils, had drifted over to point at the back of my head. Then it shot me point blank.

I yelped at the sting and grabbed it in my biggest claws, she was seriously starting to piss me of-

"Tay~lor," she sing songed; "What about your hair?"

Oh shit, my hair had taken the full blow...and was completely untouched. Not a mark from the attack that, if I remembered the colour right, had not only blown chunks out of the crystals, but set those chunks on fire as well.

"Yeah, you're plenty tough you big baby. A few dozen lasers aren't going to hurt you."

Deciding that arguing about Lisa's new idea of laser tag was going no where I switched topics.

"So I'm guessing it was you that sent up that light? Have you found anyone else yet?", remembering that she had been the one who triggered this little reunion I decided to be forgiving and awkwardly reached out a hand to pat her on the arm, or something. Whatever I was planning was derailed when my hand went a good inch into her shoulder without resistance before stopping.

Her face drained of expression, then her tired sigh reverberated through my feet as she flickered and vanished. Revealed in her place was a twisted mass of tentacles that formed the rough shape of her body. Several had split at the ends into myriad smaller feelers that looked to have been forming a more detailed outline wherever I was touching her. Now the whole lot unravelled and slunk away into the rest of the coils. Her coils, really hers.

_'I'm not just a pretty face any more.'_ Oh. Oh Lisa.

"I wasn't venting or anything," the voice came from the core itself, I supposed there must have been some effect keeping me from realising it earlier; "I just felt like having some fun when I realised I had company, I didn't actually figure out it was you until you'd moved around for a bit."

"It's not like you to get violent like that?"

"I tried talking first." Her voice came from a stray shard of crystal across the clearing, a familiar bright pink laser had just hit it.

"Ah, I'm sorry. You just looked kinda scary..." Oh fuck I didn't just say that. Please tell me I didn't just say that.

I felt like the biggest asshole in the world, good job Taylor. Guess more feet just makes it easier to shove them in your big mou-

"Stop beating yourself up, I definitely got the better deal. You have no idea how awesome this is."

"Wha-?"

"Meh, I wasn't that invested in my body anyway. This one has boosted powers, super-toughness and enough firepower to blast the crap out of everyone who's ever gone after the squishy Thinker first." she really did sound cheerful about it; "Oh yeah. I can try on whatever clothes I like too."

The orb started projecting her image again, flickering through a ridiculous variety of outfits before settling on a fancy ballgown of all things. I turned away with a snort, she certainly seemed like she was dealing with it okay.

"Wait, look back at me."

"Why? I've seen that gown before and my opinion of it hasn't changed much."

"Ah, it makes it easier for me to figure it out if you're looking at it too." Well there was the dawning horror again, that was becoming a far too familiar feeling today.

"I can't actually see anything. Or smell or hear or so on. I think my body can pick up the light and sound and stuff but I don't get it."

That didn't make any sense.

"It makes perfect sense. Whatever changed us has based our senses around our powers. Or maybe it just didn't include any other way to sense stuff than our powers. So you sense stuff via your swarm and I infer stuff based on inputs I can't directly access."

"Oh stop looking so sad, it's not like you're imagining." She twirled her be-gowned image. "Less like sensory deprivation, more like being a computer program. All I get is the data but the data is amazing Taylor. It's like my power was blind and deaf and too stupid to breathe and now it's perfect. This is totally worth it."

With that she seemed to judge the conversation over and dismissed her image. Then a few of the thicker core-tentacles gently nudged me off of her, a section of the ground having been cleared right down to the bare (crystal, surprisingly) floor. Seemingly so that she wouldn't knock me over when she got up.

It was a little awe inspiring. Bohu was way bigger of course, Lisa probably wasn't much more than a hundred metres long from core to tip of her trailing tendrils, but she moved like an octopus and a snake had trained a vine to be a ninja. Twisting smoothly into a towering column, then propelling herself into the spires around us where she twined her way through them to look back down at me. Or at least point her core at me.

Me and the hole she'd been sitting on the whole time. It was a fairly big hole.

"I was looking down there when you found me, hence the hillock impression, and I think I've found two more of our compadres."

I had already zipped a few bugs into the dark space, making use of some that had just recovered from Lisa's stunning attacks, and they found a space that would have matched the clearing in size if it wasn't filled with what looked very much like gigantic egg sacs. Surprisingly not made of crystal, all but two of them were clear and empty.

Those two were both too clouded to make out more than that they contained a large shape and a smaller one respectively.

"It's Lily and Sabah, don't make me explain the reasoning please, it took me hours to figure it out." I took her at her word. "They're still asleep, which was how I figured out that we've been asleep. Probably for longer than-"

Finally someone else interrupted her. An alabaster statue of a regal man about two thirds my height strolled barefoot into the clearing. Clothed in a lot of finery -silks, jewels, gold, jewelled silks, that kind of thing- he had a very familiar face made slightly more masculine and with a neat little goatee. He was also carrying a naked grey-skinned demon girl about two thirds _his_ size, who was in turn playing on a ridiculously tiny games console.

He spoke first, since Aisha seemed engrossed in her game.

"'Sup Dorks?"

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

With the introductions done, it took a fair bit of cajoling to get Aisha to put some clothes on. Since apparently she didn't care if any of us saw her naked and clothes took effort, but threatening to cover her in bugs (she thankfully forgot that I'd have rather just left her naked) finally did the trick. Abruptly she was very definitely clothed, the same familiar-but-not-the-same features that Alec and I now had, were covered by strips of black cloth flowing in a breeze that wasn't there. An ornate mask hovered in front of her face, hiding the pointiest grin I could imagine. The tusks and spikes of the mask blended into her real horns quite nicely. She looked a lot more threatening now she was dressed.

In fact she'd never been naked at all. Why the hell had I thought she was naked?

Lisa rumbled grumpily at the same time as the memory flickered back to normal up to the point she had told our minds that she was wearing clothes.

"Sorry, sorry. I'm still getting the hang of this memory modifying stuff. Too much, it leaks into your long term memory and that happens, too little and you'll just shake it right off."

So that was Aisha's power boost. That was going to be abused at every opportunity, I had no doubt.

"I've been practising on Alec but it's not easy you know, never had to think of all these little details before."

The mention of Alec brought my attention back to him, which was his cue to fuss with his clothes like he was in front of a mirror. They actually managed to draw attention away from the Simurgh-esque body. It really was a ridiculous amount of finery, especially given the obvious crown motif he had running through every bangle, ring, bracelet, chain, necklace, brooch and miscellaneous dangling adornment. The silk draped all over him was slightly more restrained, even if the effect was still to make him look like the most expensive pantomime sultan known to man.

Except that he pulled it off somehow, managing to give an impression that was equal parts regal and lazy. It was a little disconcerting in fact, given Alec had only bothered with the second of those in the time I'd known him. Fortunately the grin that split his face broke the spell, because sharp looking teeth or no, that smile was pure Alec.

"So I guess that makes you two the only nudists here? Is that any example to set for us impressionable youths?"

Only Alec could make happiness look and sound so punchable.

Though nevertheless I set some of myself to weaving a covering for my upper body. Now that I was in company it felt a bit weird to rely on hair for modesty. Which was a welcome shred of normalcy.

Aisha and Alec coming up to my abs was considerably less normal and thus less welcome. However the world still hadn't decided to bend to my whims, so I had to deal with it. In this case that meant investigating Aisha's current source of amusement -since the clothing debate was no longer distracting her from it- and source of a yet another creeping sensation of horror for me.

Rather than asking her for a look at it and risking another dose of comedy, I just used my minions to examine it. Having them flit closer to where Alec slouched against a crystal spire and Aisha sat against him. It wasn't hard to get a look at the little piece of technology. Finding a standard, if unfamiliar, mass-manufactured plastic shell with an equally unfamiliar logo was exactly what I'd been afraid of. I was starting to suspect that it wasn't that the console was tiny and Alec and Aisha were sma-

"You're the big one, I'd say you're about twenty five feet tall." blurted out Lisa. A beat passed and she twisted apologetically, or at least I thought it was meant to look apologetic, reminding me of someone wringing their hands. It wasn't needed. I'd have asked her for confirmation either way...

"It's not the worst thing about all this." I said slowly, wondering why this was bothering me so much more than turning into a, whatever the hell I-

Why was I wasting time wondering what I was when Lisa had turned into a cthulhoid oracle?

"You're not going to like it." she pre-empted my question.

Alec beat me to it, "Is us not liking it going to make it any less true?" Aisha looked up from her game and leant back against Alec's side, clearly as interested as the rest of us.

"...Fair point." she sighed -or at least made a sighing sound- deeply enough that I almost believed it wasn't an attempt to delay the inevitable; "Ok so, it's like this...we're Endbringers now. I mean we seem to have a little more functional biology but...yeah..."

"..." "..." "..."

That...actually...made sense.

I was huge, my power was on overdrive and I was definitely much much tougher than a human. Scion had taken us and made us into nascent Endbringers, what the fuck were we meant to do now? Were we going to lose our minds soon? Would we start attacking cities and killing people? The questions whirled in my mind too fast to pick out a single one to think on, it was enough that I considered condensing my swarm fully. Shutting the world out so I could focus on thinking this through.

The pair of tentacles that slid around me put a stop to that line of thought. It took me a moment even to realise what Lisa was doing. Then it clicked and I returned the hug as best I could. There was a bright side to her having so many limbs now, another little silver lining I guess.

The lack of smart-ass comments from Aisha and Alec was jarring, but it wasn't hard to see why. The two hadn't moved from their position of casual bodily contact, but Aisha had taken a hand off her game to clasp one of his as best she could with the size difference. Alec had dropped his usual smile for a disturbingly serious look, it had me recalling a long ago conversation about the relative risks of having an Endbringer under our control.

After several more fights with the monsters, experience and the hydra-like results of Behemoth's death had stripped away the humour of such jokes. Now here we were, in an absurdly funny situation with not a laugh to be found. It was a strange kind of pressure. Like there was a vacuum before me but I had no way to fill it productively, no answer to the madness we had found ourselves caught up in.

So instead of attempting one I just said the first thing that came into my head.

"Does that make us the Endsiders then?"

There was a long beat of extremely awkward silence, then the others spoke.

"Was that meant to be...funny?" Said Alec in a tone of dawning wonder.

And I promptly wished that they'd stayed silent.

"I think, could you shift your leg a bit," Aisha resettled herself as Alec obliged; "I think it was meant to be like a joke."

"Nah, can't be. Jokes are funny right? I remember jokes being funny when we were human, should still be the same shouldn't it?"

Lisa joined in, a note of disbelief in her voice, "It's not even the good name. Surely the obvious one would be Underbringers?"

"That sounds way better."

"I vote for Lisa's suggestion. All in favour?"

"You guys are ass holes and I hate you all." I moaned.

They were unmoved, "Technically I'm the only guy here. It's mean to single me out you know." Well...time to punch Alec in his face.

"Yeah Taylor." Aisha competed for my retribution; "Shouldn't us Endsiders stick together?"

I was taking stock of my bugs to determine exactly how to inflict maximum pain and humiliation when Alec's laughter trailed off. Looking right at me he smiled just a little. A much less aggravating smile than his norm.

"Ah, thanks dork. I was getting all morose and shit."

The other two followed suit. The frozen atmosphere of before having been shattered completely. Which had been what I was hoping for now I thought about it.

"Well I suppose we should probably focus on what to do now." Time might not be on our side after all. Even if it was very tempting to continue my revenge plot, I decided to shelve it for now and figure out what to do. "First things first, we need to find the others. They should be fine but-"

"Oh come on, we're practically invincible now. You just want to hurry and find my bro so you can read a book together or whatever boring shit you two get up to."

She wasn't entirely wrong about me wanting to find Brian as soon as possible. Though it wasn't like I was only worried about him. If anything Rachel was more worrying, given how believable a thought her rampaging in response to all this was. I doubted when would hurt anyone -if there even was anyone else in this bizarre place- but destroying stuff was another matter. Fortunately _getting_ hurt was hardly a worry now, for any of us.

Lisa maintained her annoying new gimmick, "Taylor is right, Brian will watch out for himself. It's Rachel we need to find first."

Alec started to say that I hadn't said that at all but I shook my head at him. We might as well get used to it.

Instead he said, "Well if we're decided against just waiting around here for the other two..." He trailed off in blatant hope that we would change our minds and not force him to get up.

Aisha spoke up in his stead, "We might have come across Rachel's trail on the way here. We figured it was better to head for the light first though."

"What do you mean by 'might'?" I said hesitantly.

They genuinely gave a dramatic pause before Alec broke it in dramatic tones.

"I figure it looked like Rachel's style but if not...the next best explanation for what we found would be that Behemoth is back from the dead."

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

We set out not long after that, stopping just long enough to conceal the hole that lead to where Lily and Sabah still slept. As well as leaving them a message. Lisa had carved everything we knew into the ground beneath them with her lasers, including an arrow pointing in our chosen direction. We had to hope that they'd be able to keep themselves safe since taking them with us wasn't an option in case it might damage their growth pod things.

That chosen direction didn't lead back through the same kind of smashed path as I had left behind me. Clearly Alec and Aisha had not felt the need to rush frantically for the light like I had. We walked in comfortable silence through the same variety of environments as I had seen before, a desert of powdered crystal made up the latest scenery. The dawn had broken, sunlight sparkled across the sand and it seemed to be giving Lisa plenty of fun playing landshark.

I had reshaped myself to better traverse it without constantly sinking into the sparkling dunes, Alec and Aisha had neither Lisa's nor my advantages for this kind of terrain and were knee deep most of the time. Not that it was having much effect on our progress. Tireless bodies and all. It made worrying about any of our physical safety a bit unnecessary.

Speaking of the two of them, they continued to stick close together. Aisha now sitting up on his left shoulder and occasionally taking a break from her game to braid a few strands of his hair. Such closeness wasn't unheard of for the two of them, but was certainly a step up in intimacy from what I'd seen of them for the last few years. They were close but not bound together at all times like this.

Though looking at the way Aisha would regularly break from her game to sweep her eyes across then path to come, Alec inevitably following the same rough path that her gaze had tracked...I suspected the reason why they were suddenly inseparable. As tempting as it was to just ask Lisa and find out, they hadn't volunteered information on their new senses and I was determined to respect that.

Though when Aisha scowled at her hand-held and popped batteries out of a compartment on the back of it, I found myself with a question that I could ask. Aisha swapping the drained batteries for several she pulled from a fold in Alec's robes, made that question loom quite a bit larger.

"Where'd you find that thing?"

She paused in fumbling the fresh batteries in and turned to face me. "You mean this?" She waved the thing at me.

I choked down then urge to be sarcastic and nodded.

"I don't know where you guys woke up, but me and Alec were in this big palace."

"Half of it was a palace," Alec chimed in; "the other half was some kind of floating aquarium. No fish but there were all these crystal models of them."

Aisha drove her elbow into his head to little real effect.

"Hey! I'm telling the story. Yeah so we wake up in this palace and we're both falling all over the place 'cause I can only see what Alec's already seen and he can only see what I'm seeing and I don't get how that can work when neither of us is actually using the bits we're looking and hearing out of but it does and eventually we figure it out enough to start talking to one another."

It occurred to me a little late that rather than not wanting to talk about their sensory issues, they might have just forgotten to mention them.

Aisha dropped one of her batteries and had to scramble for it in the sand. So Alec started moving his head as if looking for it while he took over the story. "We managed to find our way to each other, mostly by trial and error honestly, and that's when we found it. An entire arcade just tucked away in this big crystal ballroom."

"Dude you don't have to keep saying crystal when everything is made out of it." Aisha jumped back in having received her quarry; "So this room, I think it must have been my lair or something, no way anyone else could decorate a place that awesome. I mean it was loot central in there, that's where Alec got his new clothes. And I got a replacement for my lost little DS."

Aisha broke off into bemoaning all her lost save files and having to start over. Meanwhile I was turning the whole thing over in my head. Something-

Lisa spoke in my ear, "Something about that room doesn't seem right does it." I screamed a little at the tendril that had popped out of the sand without any bloody warning whatsoever. Then it started talking in obviously fake exasperation; "Oh calm down, you can't be this jumpy Taylor. What if we run across a giant monster that isn't friendly?"

"If you keep jumping out at me then _this_ giant monster isn't going to be friendly." I grumbled. The point stood though. A room filled with stolen (or so I was assuming) property was pretty fucking out of place in this world. It begged the question of who had done the stealing.

Then my furthest scouts found what we were looking for and I had bigger concerns.

Literally. The trail that we had been searching for was huge. A good hundred metres across and stretching as far as I could see in both directions. As for what it looked like...I understood what Alec had meant in bringing up Behemoth. The sands were burnt, frozen, smashed, fused, corroded, displaced, trampled and many other fates beside. It was like a dozen Legends had come through doing their best disco-ball-of-various-dooms impressions, except I had seen Legend fight enough to know that he was nothing if not precise.

Precision had not come anywhere near this. So good odds on it being Rachel.

By the time that any of us got within real body range of the devastation, our progress still slowed mostly by the humanoids among us, I had hit upon a bit of inspiration. I could design my own bugs, I knew that already. So why should that be limited to the kinds of powers that they'd showed at random?

Trying to create mind-type Thinker bugs had felt very wrong and resulted in a twitchy slug with a scorpion's tail in its mouth for no reason, but sensory powers took just fine. And like that I was seeing things a human couldn't even describe...unfortunately it didn't much help.

I could see a serious light show now but that didn't give me any idea what any of it meant. My hopes of a footprint glowing in gamma radiation proved lacking. In fact if I had my bugs right then gamma radiation was entirely absent. A welcome tally against Behemo-

"Yeah it was Rachel and I'm-"

"The one getting interrupted!" I exploded. Barely restraining myself from attacking her. This was not time for fucking around and if they couldn't see that th-

Another eldritch hug, this one I shrugged off only to be practically dog-piled by replacement tendrils. I fought off a few before giving in and admitting the intent was right. I was being ridiculous. Those three had always coped with stress by being incredibly annoying and I'd been fine with it before. Mostly because I was usually good at dealing with my own stress.

Because I was definitely stressed right now and the lack of any real physical symptoms only made it harder to control. No heart rate to slow. Breathing was optional anyway. Closing my eyes did nothing. Well that wasn't a new one, usually I'd just ask Brian to blanket me for a bit but...well that was the problem wasn't it.

No tracking powers. No idea how to approximate them. I was stronger than I had ever been and I was practically helpless. Just following Lisa's trail while my friend and my fiancé were both missing.

Their safety was beyond my control like it had not been in years and I was probably not dealing with it well.

I kept telling myself that he'd be fine and we were practically invulnerable now, but we didn't even know how all this had happened. We might have some weakness the real Endbringers lacked or Scion might come back for us or the person who did this might have a super weapon to kill us or...or...he might not even have made it. He might be the exception. He always had been before, so why not this time too but in the worst way.

I was scared. I thought I might finally understand what it was like for my dad -like every time I had thought of him since it happened, I was hit by the memory of the sunlit funeral last year and crying endlessly in a quiet embrace- when mum died. Finding something good in your life and being terrified of losing it. Finding someone who makes you better than you are alone and...I mean when I got worked up enough to do dumb shit was exactly when I had gotten to rely on having someone to ground me. To say that hey, maybe turning yourself in isn't the best way to deal with Dinah's death. Then I could turn around and say, you know Brian, Aisha is old enough to make her choices and she probably won't like it if you kill Alec.

Keeping one another in check was slightly impossible when one of us was missing like this.

Fuck. Now I was wasting time. I shrugged Lisa off much more gently than before, six arms making that a strange achievement. Orienting myself to face where she had emerged from the sand like a huge nightmarish flower.

"Sorry for snapping at you, which way do we go?"

When there was no reply I pre-empted the bad feeling, "You don't know do you?"

"This is ridiculously chaotic. It was definitely Rachel and she has some kind of master power still but I think she must be letting it run wild. I'm getting as much to say the pattern goes one way as to say it goes the other...this might take a while."

Then she stopped moving purposefully, tendrils drifting aimlessly back and forth. Presumably focusing all her inference on the problem and none on her limbs and where they were. Which meant I might as well just relax with...

"Aisha? What the fuck are you doing?"

She was crouched on all fours and...doing a...bloodhound impression? Alec seemed equally baffled, standing a few steps behind her with arms folded, holding her hand-held between two fingers and face twisted in confusion.

"Not that I'd normally mind the view babe, but the smell of burnt sand isn't my favourite thing and I can't actually see the view."

Aisha ignored him and me, continuing to sniff around while Lisa continued her upside down jellyfish impression. I met Alec's gaze, which was extremely hard to remember he could not actually see with, and crooked an eyebrow. I guess he must have felt me do it because he responded with a shrug.

The next few minutes consisted of a very odd silence. Other than the rustling of movement no one made a sound. Then Aisha stood up and started dancing. After several seconds of it I finally lost my temper and had my swarm fall on her.

Once she was properly wrapped up and dangling from one of my larger claws I uncovered her mouth and glared with every eye I had available.

She thrust an arm through the binding and pointed off along the trail.

"That way. It's that way, don't eat me."

My question must have shown because she started to practically radiate pride and proceeded to explain.

"I've had this weird feeling since I woke up. Like when you're thinking of something and it's right on the tip of your tongue but it was like it was on the tip of your brain and I just figured it out! I can sense memories."

Yes, she'd already told us that several hours ago. Could Endbringers get heatstroke? It had been a while since we entered this desert zone right? Aisha used her free hand to slap at me ineffectively and continued.

"Not like that, I knew I could sense you guys' memories. What I just figured out is that I can do it after someone's left. Like I can sense Rachel's memories right now, what she was hearing at least."

After a few seconds pause I decided that asking any of the questions itching at my brain (or whatever had replaced it) would just rely things further. The best thing to do was just trust Aisha and get moving. I needed to find the others and nothing was getting in my way. No more delays.

So I started walking. After a few minutes Lisa caught up to us, I tried very hard not to let my smile show at her annoyance. Focusing my attention on the trail ahead. Which was made a little harder when I noticed that Alec hadn't felt the need to unbind Aisha when he picked her up and was now dangling her by the thread at her feet, Aisha looking for all the world like a very strange lantern. One that seemed to alternate between cursing loudly and enjoying the ride.

Alec chose to wait until we'd been walking for several minutes before voicing a thought, "Couldn't we just have checked which side was hotter? You know, all the melted bits?"

...

And now Lisa and I were both in a grump.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

The trail took a long time to start warming up.

We had passed through the desert, several other areas including an entire lifeless city, and finding ourselves in a valley of floating mountains for the last hour or so. A dense mist blanketed the ground and had forced us to climb up and jump from one drifting island to the next. Whatever the mist was made of was far too effective at obscuring senses to try and slog through it.

The sun was going down when it finally felt like we were close. No longer just seeing destruction, now we were abruptly finding lingering effects of a good dozen different powers. Gooey balls of acid and fires that froze everything around them. Tiny black holes and lumps of stone so heavy that they pulled sand towards themselves. The size of the effects seemed to vary significantly though, most looked to be the work of fairly standard capes but here and there were areas where one of the powers seemed to have been boosted to terrifying levels.

Now sunset was in full swing and we were relying on Lisa to keep any sight of the trail beneath the mist. The way it twisted and curved in this place made for a contrast with the previous straight lines, but Rachel must have been unwilling to climb up like we had and her trail stayed on the ground despite the obvious difficulties she'd had finding her way.

Given that we could barely see the trail I wasn't surprised when we almost continued right past the end of it. Only chance had me drift one of my bugs blindly into a massive shape in the mist. I was already leaping down as my swarm passed on the news.

Which proved poorly thought out. It wasn't as disorienting as Brian's power but it was a close thing. Only my swarm locational sense kept me from just stumbling blindly in circles. It was still a shock when the others emerged out of the mist mere feet from me. Then an even bigger shock when we found the shape I had stumbled onto, and it was a huge lump of roughly carved crystal.

We were already moving when the ambush hit.

The horde of things that fell on us might be described as dogs in the same way my minions might be described as bugs. Except unlike bugs, a lot more people knew how many legs and heads and so on dogs were supposed to have. Also where my bugs looked fairly possible as living creatures went, these things pretty clearly had powers.

For instance the one that was leaping straight down at me didn't have joints but still kept its various pieces floating in the right places as if it did. It had a rock (an actual piece of stone, since this place was as uniformly composed of crystal as everywhere else I assumed it had created the stone somehow) clenched in its mouth. Then its jaw burst apart and the rock accelerated towards me too fast to dodge.

The impact hurt. It was far from the worst pain could recall but I still opted to dissipate into my swarm when I saw it recollecting its mouthpieces around a newly forming rock. Three more dogs joined it but I was already moving.

My friends were handling the attack well by themselves, there were maybe two dozen variants of blaster-dog among about sixty of the things and most of them had gone for the largest target. Lisa seemed unharmed by their first volley and was shooting back with just as much fury as they attacked with. Already the area was devastated by exotic effects and sheer destruction, the mist blown away completely. Meanwhile Alec was untouched despite the dozen that had gone after him, every one of their attacks missing either barely or by a huge enough margin to hit one of the other dogs instead. I had suspicions about the latter of those misses but more importantly there was no need to stay and help.

Instead I flew for the source of the ambush, an island high above from which a few stragglers were still descending. Not bothering to retake my full body and climb, I instead flew straight. Dispersing around the few attacks sent my way.

Cresting the edge of the island I reformed and this time I did so properly. Instead of letting my body form randomly I guided the process according to what my swarm already saw there. So when a ball of fire the size of a city bus met my arrival, I reared up on my hindmost legs and spat a ball of gunge out of the circular mouthpiece on my front.

The two met, larger swallowing smaller only to blink out when the gunge expanded in an instant. It absorbed the energy that came in contact with it and exploded in size accordingly. Still I abandoned that counter measure as quickly as I had formed it. Leaping aside of a charge that came inches behind the fireball and had burst through the expanded goo like it wasn't even there.

I landed with my new power in place and hurled out lines of chitinous 'silk' in every direction. My swarm grabbed the pieces and started to weave them through the air around my opponent while they recovered from nearly charging off the edge of the island. I had managed to lay a dozen loops before they noticed and exploded not with fire as I had expected and prepared for, but with a wave of vibrant liquid that dissolved both silk and swarm. Both our surprise attacks had failed and we looked at one another in the settling dust.

I noticed more dogs circling or clinging to my opponent but ignored them in favour of what I was certain must be Rachel.

Her shape was entirely canine, albeit writ on a scale even larger than me. That form was beautiful though, like a wolf and a lioness had settled their differences and combined with one another, then atop that regal form had been layered armour plates and back-swept horns. Though I couldn't seen any eyes, only a pair of ears that swivelled and tracked me closely. A barbed tail swept around from behind to curl before her, then whipped back the same way just as quickly.

Or at least, all that seemed to be the basic shape. Growing haphazardly from it were twenty two more heads, none of them resembling the rest of the body in the slightest. Some were barely poking through the skin, others were found atop long necks like particularly weird snakes. The size was equally variable with two of them larger than the basic head and a cluster of nine looking hilariously tiny against the rest of her body. None of them had eyes and every single one corresponded to one variety of blaster dogs.

Currently a blunt and insectile head poking from her left shoulder was glowing dimly, moments ago it had been a flaming head that glowed and the main body had flickered with an aura of flame alongside it. Now it dripped acid and spewed corrosive smoke instead, the ground hissing loudly beneath it.

In short, I was not the only one who could change powers on the fly. Great.

Wait. That really was great. This wasn't an enemy and her being powerful was a damn good thing. Taking a useless breath, I blew it through my hair and stepped forward to speak.

Then leapt as high as I could to avoid the stream of acid that shot my way. Unlikely to really hurt me that it was, I guessed it would still hurt an awful lot. Rather than fighting back I dispersed again and began trying to make my way closer. It wasn't easy.

I could guess what was going through Rachel's mind enough to see how when would be opposed to my swarm getting near her. That didn't make me much happier with dodging around spatial distortions then scattering around a lance of plasma before diving beneath a few hundred homing blasts. I avoided an opening in the onslaught due to it being an obvious trap -Rachel had gotten much better at chess since she and Lily began playing but she was a terrible poker player to this day- then decided enough was enough and shot straight upwards until the island was a speck far below.

I was still having to dodge her attacks but it was a lot easier at these ranges. Meanwhile I was preparing what I hoped would end this nonsense. Mostly because it was going to sting badly enough even if I didn't follow up by being wide open for Rachel to lay into me. Thinking of which I checked my shoulder where that rock had hit to find it had spider webbed cracks through the first few layers of my skin. Not a real injury on this body but it had still hurt. I wasn't sure how to feel about that.

Then my preparations were done and I wasted no more time. I dropped like a meteor, Rachel making every effort to blow me from the sky. There was no defensive anything, though I suspected she could create some kind of barrier with the array she had available. Instead she sent light rays and time distortions and everything else she had at me. It worked, the first time distortion to clip me sheered off a hand and slowed me down, then the rest of the blasts hit and a section of my body seared with agony then winked out of existence.

Meanwhile my core body descended off to the side of the clone I had formed, hidden by a shimmering field of not-bugs that looked like empty sky from the outside. By the time she noticed me I had one of Rachel's heads in every hand and it was far too late.

"Your favourite Disney princess is Merida but you always loved Snow White! When you were still in foster care you tried to get animals to help you clean up like her and you ruined the kitchen! You and Aisha made us all watch that Aleph pony cartoon and you punched Alec for making jokes about horns in it! When I went to pick out my wedding dress you sat in Sabah's shop all day while she tried out designs on me and you never complained!"

I wasn't sure if it was volume or content that made her thirty foot tall bulk stagger away from me but I didn't try to hold onto her. For a moment I almost regretted it as she looked to be charging her next attack, then every single one of her heads receded but the main one. The dogs around us transforming into smaller copies of her.

"Taylor?" I was bizarrely happy to discover she still sounded the same. It made no sense at all and was incredibly welcome.

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Rachel had apologised in her usual gruff manner once we were all back in one place, Lisa the only one looking even a little worse for wear. Aisha in particular was smug as hell that her stealth could take us all off guard despite the changes, fortunately any urge she might have had to start another prank war died when Rachel started talking.

Her power had been identified by Lisa as appropriately compared to Behemoth. Just with a hint of Myrrdin too. After enjoying our blank looks she had clarified that as best she could understand, Rachel's power combined dynakinesis and dimensional manipulation. Allowing her to create minions and enhance both her and them by tapping into other dimensions with specific energetic content. The sensory aspect had been what spurred Lisa to explain, clarifying what Rachel meant when she said when could hear something from far away.

"I hear Brian calling. For us." Became a much more worrying set of words with that explanation in mind. When she continued to say that she had been hearing him since she woke up more than a day ago and that he sounded like he was in trouble...well I might have gotten a little worked up about it.

"Well what the fuck are we standing around here for! Let's go find him already!" I was already moving, bouncing from foot to foot for lack of a destination.

"Taylor, she's hearing him from another dimension. Running around isn't going to get us to him any faster."

I'd been agitated for almost two days, getting more and more worked up with every new revelation. Now she was telling me to calm down? To stand around while he could be hurt again? Like he'd just stand around while we were...

I was doing it again. I don't think I'd ever realised how much I used my swarm sense and body to calm down until neither of them was suitable for such a thing. Was I really such a hot head? Which didn't send my thoughts down a helpful track, what with the obvious progenitor of that trait and all.

Forcing myself back to the here and now I marshalled my faculties. This had to be approached calmly and rationally.

"All of our senses are based on our powers, right? So if you can hear him then you must be able to do something to reach them? We just need to figure out how."

Rachel shifted from one massive paw to another -somehow this body fit her better than her old one had and in some corner of my mind that wasn't near panic I was happy for her- in obvious hesitation. When she spoke her words were gentle, her tone a little defeated, "There's a direction to it. Like it's coming from somewhere, just not somewhere here." She turned side on to the rest of us and paced a few steps, her minions milling mindlessly around her, "Except it is here. This place was where I was looking for and I thought something would happen when I got here but-!" She broke off into a snarl, her paw sweeping a great furrow in the ground and littering the rest of us with fragments.

I looked around with more than a little uncertainty, if I had this right then Brian was in this place but in another universe's version of it. Maybe Earth Bet's or maybe Earth Gimel's, definitely not Earth Crystal-Fetish though.

"I think I may have something," Came Lisa's incredibly welcome voice. Hopefully she would be able to save the day again. "I'm just spit-balling here, but so far Aisha and Taylor have both found new aspects to their powers...I think that we still have the same powers as always, it's just that these bodies, Endbringer bodies, are better tuned to them. Like they can channel much more of the Passenger's abilities without...I dunno, exploding or something."

Alec spoke up, "Ok, but wouldn't that clash with us not knowing how to use our powers right out the gate?"

"Not necessarily," Lisa pounced with her detective-reveals-all voice in full swing, "What if the only reason we can know how to use our powers so readily as normal capes is that those powers are really small scale? As in compared to how they can potentially be used. So there's not enough there for it to be hard to use it."

I spoke up, "But when we get access to more of it, it's not immediately there to be used. Aisha had to figure out how to pick up old memories, I had to figure out how to transform myself...Rachel needs to figure out how to open a...portal I guess?"

"How?" growled the target of my remark, reminding me that I wasn't the only one who might care about Brian and be frustrated at not being able to reach him. That was a nice top-up to my guilt complex. So I figured the best thing to do was at least help her to not feel shit about this too.

"We just need to find a trigger to pull. Can you describe your powers? What they're like?"

She was silent for what felt like a long time, the silence that all of us by now recognised as her thinking seriously about something. Finally she quietly said, "It's...I'm standing a bunch of places at once and I can hear all of them at once." There was another long pause, this time I nearly spoke up but Aisha's hand on my arm kept me quiet, "But not confusing, just like trees creaking and those little chirping bugs when you're going to sleep outdoors. Then if I try listen to just one like I'm doing now then all the others get even easier to ignore and stuff in that gets clearer. And it's not just sound neither, I can hear other stuff...I know what colour stuff is and what it tastes like and smells like, it's all hearing though." She started to pick up speed, "But there's some that're much closer, the others are a room and in but those ones are right on top of me, like I'm wearing them and they all sound the same. No, I fucking mean that they don't sound like a lot of different sounds, those ones sound like all the same all the time."

"I can open those ones up if I listen to them real close and kinda reach out. Then the stuff in those ones comes out and I can use it and put it into my dog-things and stuff."

I barely noticed her distinguishing her minions from actual dogs, far more focused on the seed of hope here.

"So that's it then. You just need to focus on the one you can hear Brian from and do like you do with the energy worlds." Lisa beat me to it.

"It's not like that! You think I'm fucking stupid? Of course I tried that but it's not the same, that shit doesn't work!" Rachel snapped.

Lisa kept her tone calm, "My power got boosted too Rachel, I think it does work like that. There's just a trick to it." She wrapped Rachel in one of those surprisingly pleasant octo-hugs of hers, "You just have to find the trick, and since I have never thought that you were stupid I'm certain you can find it."

The giant canine huffed twice, then all the tension drained out of her and she nodded.

After that all we could do was give her space and wait.

It took a lot less time than I was afraid it might.

It also happened a lot more suddenly than I had been expecting. One moment she was padding in circles. The next she had stopped, settled back on her haunches and howled long and loud at the moon that was by now high in the sky.

Except it wasn't just a howl, not just noise. It was energy, it was light and matter and other things that I'd never had words for and still couldn't describe. Then it ripped a hole in the world.

I could have said a lot about how strange that portal looked, even after spending a lot of time around the one we'd had to Earth Gimel. But the darkness that filled it was so familiar, so beautifully familiar, that I had no words left in me.

However I had hardly begun to send my swarm in when a cluster of rockets screamed through it, missing every one of us to slip over the edge of the island and tumble to the ground far below. The blast was loud but not enough to shake our footing, a useless attack against any of us. It still meant that attacks were happening and I had yet another horrible feeling as I realised why Brian had been calling out for us for a day and a half.

"Brian! Over here!" My outburst might have made things worse but I hadn't been able to hold it back. I just hoped that whatever had happened to his senses still let him hear me. That he knew to get to the portal and escape. That he was still able to move that much.

I hesitated then, unsure whether it was better to head into the darkness and risk impeding his escape, or to stay where I was and risk him being unable to escape by himself. Around me I could practically feel the others struggling with the same choice. Then Alec perked up a moment before a massive cloud of darkness soared through the portal and slammed silently into the ground.

It was dissipating fast enough that he had to be doing it himself, which had to be a good sign.

Already I could make out a rough shape, humanoid, then features began to emerge. The shroud reduced to a cloak that left his chest and face almost visible. His...wings? They were completely exposed, made not from flesh but a multitude of floating balls of fog only a few shades lighter than his darkness. Except out of them a few dozen were different, illuminated and unique in their shapes and colours. I was too occupied with covering the distance to him to pay much more attention than that.

I reached him as the shroud became entirely skin tight, his features -relaxed in slumber- revealed at last and...

"Holy shit, someone beat up that demon guy from Fantasia." exclaimed Alec, and I couldn't exactly disagree.

I'd had nightmares about that monster after watching the film as a kid. So seeing it, or something very similar at least, with my fiancé's face and body and power was all just plain weird. Also strangely hot, which my therapist would probably tell me meant something about my childhood or repression or need to pay more for our sessions or something.

Then the last of the shadows coating him fell away and my weird fetishes were wiped from my mind.

He was **hurt**.

He was hurt badly. It said something pretty fucked up about our lives that it still wasn't the worst I'd ever seen him hurt. Not that that made it any less of a punch to the gut.

The darkness had not been coating him, it had been coating what he would have been. Without it his nudity exposed the absence of his left arm, right leg and much of his left foot. His new tail seemed to have been filling in for the missing leg, coiled around the stump as it was. However the limb damage all paled next to the true wound.

His chest was flayed, stripped past the outer layers in a way that called back memories and years of clutching one another against the tide of nightmares, my bile would have risen if I had any to rise. The damage centred around the left side of his chest, the outer most edge of which had been blown away entirely to expose a pitch black skeleton beneath the semi-human anatomy made of an Endbringer's faux-flesh.

Swelling out of that skeleton was a shimmering orb that had to be roughly half the size of his head, an orb that I knew, just looking at it brought the certainty from the depths of my mind, was the core of each of us now. There was no need for Lisa to speak for any of us to realise that it was the only truly vital organ in these bodies.

And Brian's was cracked.

A web of cracks radiated from an impact point where whatever had blasted away his left side had brushed the core. At the centre of that web it was shattered entirely, several shards missing...

I was scrambling in the dirt before I knew I'd moved, swarm hunting high and low for any speck of his heart. I needed to put him back together, that was what we did, we put one another back together so now I was going to have to do it a little more literally was all. If I just found all the pieces then he wouldn't die. Right? Right?! He wasn't allowed to go and die right after we'd survived the apocalypse, that was like something out of a bad movie.

I'd already found a few dozen pieces, not big but following a clear trajectory back to the portal. Had he jumped through? Been thrown? Either way I needed to go through to get the rest of him and anyone who tried to stop me was going to seriously fucking regret-

"He's not dying Taylor."

-being bor...n... "Wait, what?" my ingrained response to Lisa telling us something in a crisis was strong enough (in no small part due to years of it keeping me alive) to make me listen even now. It didn't stop me replying though, "What the hell do you mean he's not dying? His fucking heart's all over the floor!"

I guess even Lisa had a limit to her patience, because she zapped me before almost shouting, "Taylor you need to calm the fuck down. It's surface damage, enough to knock him out for a bit is all."

"So...?" Aisha couldn't seem to get the words out. Her voice was very small.

"He's gonna be fine. Now will you all stop panicking and get him comfortable or something?"

Oh...well now I felt a little stupid. Mostly I just felt tired.

Slumping down beside him I dragged him into my lap, which would have been far harder if he hadn't been a good five or ten feet taller than my twenty five feet. Though it was much easier to think of it as me coming up to his chest now, instead of his nose. Another change to get used to with time. A change that I would have time to get used to.

I finally recognised the other thing I was feeling. Happiness had re-emerged, the same feeling that this lot (and our two sleeping beauties) had brought to my life for two years now, with them all back where I could keep an eye on them I was almost able to relax. Though it occurred a little belatedly that as bitchy as I had been, things really had been as bad as I feared.

On reflection I'd been completely right to worry so much. Which I was self aware enough to realise probably set my therapy time back by about a year or so. That was fine, because clearly I was right and the universe hated me enough to make sure of it.

To prove it, that was the moment that the darkness filling the portal abruptly disgorged a visitor. Someone in a brightly patterned and unfamiliar costume, they practically hugged the ground for a moment before flashing to their feet in a burst of superspeed. Squinting in the light after what was probably a fairly long time in the dark.

Then they stopped moving completely. Like I could hear them breathing before and it stopped, I think even their heartbeat went silent. They- She (in fairness to me she was built like I was, it wasn't immediately obvious) stared open mouthed around at us, tears falling silently while the acrid stench of piss rose from her lower half.

She muttered curses I didn't understand in a voice like she had almost no air left in her lungs.

Then Lisa broke the silence in a friendly voice that proved her language studies the last two years had not been in vain.

The cape screamed something that sounded like 'Air Miss' and clamped hands over her ears. Then she glanced down at her legs as though she'd only just remembered she had them and bolted straight for the portal. For some reason Lisa tried to grab her, just barely falling short as she dove back into the dark like every monster in the world was on her heels.

"Well that was a bit rude." was Aisha's bemused summary. "We don't look that scary do we?"

"...I think that was a name. Eris, huh? I kinda like it..." Lisa trailed off while I returned my attention to Brian. Meanwhile Rachel proved she was often smarter than the rest of us combined and thought to close the portal with a much lower howl than the opening one.

Now. Now we could relax.

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As it turned out, relaxing was pretty weird when you didn't eat or breath and sleep was entirely optional unless you were gravely injured. I read a lot of books in that first week, sampling from a collection that Lisa figured we must have gathered while our minds still slept. We because clearly it hadn't just been me doing it, the palace and environs that Aisha and Alec woke up in was filled with loot from each of us.

Lisa's hollow tower, a sinkhole beneath giving it even more length than it's prodigious height alone would have, was probably the weirdest one. But slipping from rafter to rafter and puzzling over the code melted into the walls in ridiculously small symbols seemed to entertain her plenty.

Rachel occupied herself flitting between several worlds filled with open fields and legions of canines. Real actual dogs that I was a little concerned were going to develop sentience and declare her their goddess or something.

Alec and Aisha dove into their loot halls and...well honestly I preferred to leave what they were doing as an unknown. It would likely come out sooner or later and past experience suggested that not having the joke spoiled ahead of time would make it much easier to bear.

There was no horde for Lily and Sabah, so I supposed they must not have woken up while we all still slept. Unfortunately we were no closer to figuring out how to stir them safely, so for now we stuck to checking on them regularly.

Me. I was happy to grab a pile of books and bring them to where I was keeping my main body. Planted firmly beside Brian while he regenerated the extensive damage he had suffered. It was nice though, all the fuzzy sort-of-maternal feeling of looking after him while he was sick, but with none of the tasks that taking care of a bed-ridden human being would have required.

My worries of Scion coming charging through the wall had faded after a full week passed without Rachel hearing a trace of him. Clearly he'd vanished in the time we had slept, however many months or years that had been. Which was a topic for thought all by itself.

And well...reading all these books was starting to give me suspicions. More than suspicions if I was honest, but I really really did not want to be honest. It was bad enough that our city had been annihilated, that my parents' graves had been destroyed and everything we built had been torn down. To suspect what seemed like truth, it was too painful.

The increasing certainty that Scion had kicked the bucket did at least prompt Alec to put forward a motion that we take over the world with our new powers.

The others refused to let me vote for Brian as well as myself, which was dumb when I knew exactly what he'd vote for, but the motion still failed by four to one. Running a city had been enough work already, why any one would want to do that on an even larger scale was beyond me. Though Alec still sulked about it. As if he was even planning to do the work if we had done it, he'd probably just have claimed Antarctica and claimed his job was protecting us all from The Thing.

"I'm getting far too good at predicting those two." I said to Brian.

I'd gotten into a habit of talking to him in however many weeks it had been since we woke up. His lack of reply didn't bother me much, he'd long been a bit more of a listener than a speaker when we were together.

So it was a shock to hear him saying, "I know, they're a corrupting influence on us innocent supervillains." And that was as far as he got before I was hugging him with three pairs of arms and he had shrouded me in his power so he could sense me with it and our reunion fell apart into a lot of hugging and stuff.

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His awakening had raised another issue though, as well as giving Lisa another piece in the puzzle when she responded to Brian's reveal that he had captured Eidolon not by asking what the hell he was talking about, but rather by declaring that it must have been what woke us all up. Then refusing to explain what she was talking about other than to say that it was probably a very bad idea to let him go and slithering back off to her tower of conspiracy theories and wild suppositions.

Which had left Brian to reveal the fairly unpleasant truth of what was in the little balls of fog in his wings that were lit up and uniquely shaped. A little focus and they drifted apart to reveal tiny people, or people who had been made tiny at least.

Aisha's assessment that they were clearly pokéballs seemed dumb until Brian gestured and one of them spawned a shadowy copy of the cape inside it, dimming from the exertion but rapidly regaining its glow. The copy demonstrated the same power as the cape inside, one of the few people other than Eidolon that Brian recognised and who we all could name as Lung.

As to the rest, we all agreed that releasing them was the right thing to do, until the conversation drifted to the how and we realised that none of us had any idea how to do that without risking them all getting killed when they returned. Whatever we had done while sleeping hadn't been pleasant if Brian waking up as the target of an Endbringer fight, already with most of his injuries, was any indication.

Adding that one woman's reaction to us on top of it and the question of whether they would be treated as returning prisoners or Simurgh time bombs became a rather immediate one.

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Eventually the obvious course of action could be put off no longer. We had gathered and voted and decided that it was time. No more delaying.

Lisa had guided us to the right part of our crystal world, then Rachel had howled.

The portal that opened looked a lot less welcome than the last one, despite it having bright sunlight streaming through it rather than a wall of black. Still, I hadn't backed down from fear in a long time. So I waited for Rachel and Brian to pass through first -because I also wasn't stupid and they were both bigger and therefore tougher- then followed on their heels into a scene of utter, idyllic, panic.

Brockton Bay was everything I remembered and nothing at all like I had known. The familiar landscape seen from Captain's Hill was covered over with very unfamiliar structures. Buildings I didn't remember filled a city twice the size I had grown up in. The docks clear of sunken skeletons and choked with ships both coming and going.

Well they were mostly going now. The lovely summer morning having been split by the din of Endbringer Sirens probably had a lot to do with that. They sounded a little different, but the intent was clear.

Idly I erected protective lines throughput the fleeing crowds, fencing off areas around those who fell in the crush. I could see the others reaching out in the same sorts of ways, doing their best to keep the crowd from killing their own in sheer panic.

Once there was no longer a single human in my range I walked to a bench and delicately picked up the newspaper that had been tossed aside by the man who sat there moments ago. The motion scared away some pigeons, but they came back as soon as I moved away, pecking greedily at the bag of crusts he had been feeding them from.

The newspaper date, April seventh twenty eleven, didn't really shock any of us. There'd been no shortage of clues, or outright statements of the date for that matter. But seeing it here, on paper in a city that looked nothing like we remembered...I let the paper drift away in the wind and turned to face my friends.

"So time travel huh? I'm pretty sure that wasn't part of the plan."

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Waterspout was terrified. His teammates couldn't see it, not even Sam the wannabe psychic had been able to break his winning streak in poker, but he was very very scared.

Of course so was literally everyone here who wasn't flat out fucking insane. Fear was a very rational response to all six members of the Underworld strolling into your city a month after the usual time for an attack had come and gone. A pressing wish that you'd excepted that scholarship on the moonbase was a rational response at this point, and that place was so rigid that the Lunars were rumoured to join the military for holidays.

His terror had only climbed when he and his team of amateur villains and professional troublemakers had arrived at the meeting point to find what seemed like the cape population of the entire world teleporting in, being helicoptered in, flying in themselves and generally arriving in full combat gear and ready for war.

He'd seen Russian and Chinese capes, big name ones at that, standing within a hundred feet of each other and not trying a damn thing. Though Sam said that was not uncommon where Loki was involved. Even if neither side was willing to back down from their war, they still recognised the instigator as such.

He'd seen villains that made him want to turn and run rubbing shoulders with the Triumvirate (which remained a bizarre name for a group with seven members by now) and Dragon.

He even saw Cauldron's ever-despised agents hanging around the edges. Alexandria herself standing tall despite the loss of their strongest ally in the last fight against Chernbog. The promise of Eidolon shades was another note of terror in all of this.

She looked down at the ground and a glance to the centre of the room revealed what she lacked the nerve to stare at. Legend had stepped up and he began an honestly quite impressive speech, working in details on how to fight them all as he went on.

Don't listen to Eris, don't try to go solo around Mnemosyne, watch for Khepri's traps, watch for Loki taking control of you, don't let Kerberos ramp up, stay the fuck out of the darkness...what a load of crap.

As if any of the old advice still stood. As if there was any possible way to obey all that advice at once. Did Legend think they were all too dumb to see how this was going to end?

Harold's hand on his shoulder, big meaty slab of a hand that it was, stirred him from the spiral of his thoughts. There was no need for words beyond that brief contact. Not that Sam showed any sign of understanding it.

He didn't bother to listen to the words, her tone was trembling and that was enough to put a hand on her arm and squeeze as reassuringly as he could manage.

Then an alarm cry had gone out and they were scrambling for exits while teleporters blinked whole groups out of the courtyard where they had met and up to the roofs where they could see the coming attack. Sam grabbed the three of them, plus another three capes he'd never seen before but who looked fairly steady, and lifted the lot of them up to the roof of City Hall.

The view lacked any form of attack and he cursed whichever moron had put up the false alarm as the six nightmares arrayed before them all turned their attention from one another to the capes arrayed against them. Waterspout doubted he was the only person who nearly pissed themselves at that sight.

Then they seemed to go right back to focusing on one another, even if they stayed oriented vaguely towards the battle lines.

It occurred to Lewis Hebert that the human side of this fight probably wasn't being taken seriously.

Well that just meant they could catch the bastards off guard, this wasn't over...what the fuck?

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"Wow that is a lot of capes."

"We can take 'em."

"Rachel I think that's the first time you've said that and I've agreed with you."

"...Hey, they're uh, they're looking right at us."

"That's a little embarrassing, I don't think I've ever had this many people look at me before, let alone capes."

"Is wickly Tay-tay embarrassed?"

"Aisha, your brother gave me permission to smack you if you start with the nicknames again."

"What- bro!?"

"Will you guys stop screwing around. We're not invincible and trust me that we can definitely feel pain. This isn't the time to be-"

"Who do you guys think they're most scared of?"

"Alec this is not the ti-"

"I'd say it's probably Brian with the whole kidnapping bogeyman angle."

"You're pretty scary too, tentacles and all."

"Ha ha. That was funny, not at all tasteless you knock off Simurgh."

"Hey now, I'll have you know that I'm pretty sure I'm the scariest one...Stop laughing you dicks, I'm serious. I have reasons and everything."

"...Fine, Alec why do you think you're the scariest?"

"Ah, well let me show you guys. If you'd just turn my way Mr boss man."

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The combined forces of six continents and over a hundred countries were ready for anything. Their numbers were almost entirely composed of veterans of fights with the Underworld. Only the residents of the city that was to form the battleground included fresh fighters.

But despite all that experience and readiness, not one amongst them was expecting to see Loki gesture at the roughly humanoid cloud of darkness that was Chernbog...and for that cloud to start punching itself in the face.


	5. Brockton Bay Sirens: The Day Job

_Brockton Bay Sirens: The Day-Job_

Nobody likes it, but everyone knows it's true. You have to pay the bills.

Of course if you have a close friend (because whatever Alec said about their recent mutual unmasking, he and Vine- he and Taylor were not like that dammit) who can make floral power generators and wooden excavators and vines that grew lightbulbs, then a lot of the bills you might have had to pay on secret bases were reduced to just listening when said friend got into a rant about how it wasn't a lightbulb at all and wasn't that obvious just by looking and so on. Which was arguably not a cost at all, since she could usually be diverted into ranting about the latest abominable film-to-book adaptation that they'd sat through.

Which Brian mused, was probably another thing that Alec would claim demonstrated feelings between them. Like he wouldn't go to the cinema with Alec just as often if the smug bastard could resist whispering spoilers in his ear the entire time. Not to mention that Taylor had considerably better taste in films.

Shaking himself out of the tangent he got his attention back on the right track. Which was the track to needing money to pay rent on his apartment and hire legal counsel and buy food and clothes and so on. Clothes were especially expensive with how any major use of his power tended to have him bursting out of all but the stretchiest of tops. Since Taylor had been unable to make him something more lasting, and was way too embarrassed about the rare failure for him to press her, his costume amounted to boots, leather pants and a lot of bandoleers.

After checking through his pouches for all of his gear, Brian took another look around the storage room then checked his bags for any bits of his costume that might still be tucked inside and refolded his civilian clothes. He was considering giving his boots a polish when the door exploded with a thunderous sequence of knocks.

"Oi Grue! We going over the plan or did you fall asleep in there?"

Brian would deny to his grave having jumped at the noise. Hoping Alec hadn't sensed it through the door he groped for a reply that was more substantial than asking for a few more minutes like a kid not ready to get out of bed.

He was too late, the follow up came before he got a word out, "Hey, don't make me start humming."

It wasn't a small threat, which probably meant his partner in crime was serious. Taking a deep breath Brian tugged on his canvas mask and tugged the laces tight, then he picked up the gas cylinder holding his store of charged darkness -barely enough to get him up to bulletproof, he would need to gather more than he used on this job- before opening the door and striding out into the botanical garden of abandoned warehouses. He was careful to ignore Alec standing beside the door in full costume, they were guests after all.

Harlequin and Bitch stopped playing with their crowd of dogs when they saw him. He gave a very carefully measured tip of the chin to the latter of the two and his fellow leader returned it exactly. Then she gave a sharp whistle that had the dogs running off to the sides of the warehouse and thus opened a path between him and the paper strewn folding table in the middle of the grass.

It was a bit of an effort to keep his eyes above the chin when faced with a shapely gymnast in brightly coloured combat-armour-leotard and an ample chested amazon in skintight black leather, but given his mask left his eyes bare, unlike their respective cloth imitation of clown paint and thick tinted goggles, Brian made the effort gladly. Getting caught checking out your allies was generally a bad way to start final preparations for a heist.

Not that they could really start prepping while still two women short, but looking over the files and blueprints was better than watching Harlequin and Alec send amused looks at him.

He gathered up the files on possible targets and put them to one side, not much point reading up on the East Coast Association's Brockton offices when they had chosen a different target. Or ever, given Taylor's last name. He put the Ruby Dreams file down a lot slower, reading several post-its that hadn't been on the file when he saw it last. The rest he put down without much thought, the usual mix of mediocre targets.

Moving on to the blueprints, hand drawn lines filling in gaps in a vague printed floor plan, he ran through the list of notables. Material, safe load, thickness, which walls were load bearing and which he could safely toss cars through. All things he had already memorised but the reminder was good this close to crunch time. He'd just started checking his recollection of the vault security when the door to the other ground floor storage room banged open.

_'Do not spin around. It was just a slip of the tongue so stop worrying and just turn slowly. Slowly'_

Brian wasn't sure if he would have managed if he didn't have the newest member of the Sirens to distract him from staring at Taylor's slender body and silky black hair and the tiny glimpses of skin he could see when the flora of her costume shifted and reconfigured. He shifted his attention firmly to the blonde whose lavender and grey bodysuit he had never seen before.

It was to see he armour built into it, as well as the sturdy belt full of tools. Most of all he was happy not to see her usual smirk. She was serious about this, that was all he dared hope for in an ally and it was all he needed.

Brian stepped forward with a hand outstretched to shake...and she stepped right past it, opting instead to whisper in his ear, "You smell good?" Then walk right on by while sniggering under her breath.

A moment passed in profound betrayal before he connected Oracle's incredible job of gathering information for their plan to Taylor's innocent body language. Not that it made him want the ground to swallow him up any less. She knew, and she was almost certainly going to tell Alec that the first words out of his mouth after finally seeing her face had been complementing her scent like some sleazeball at a strip club.

Tugging on the side of his mask brought him back to reality. A vine wrapped hand was delicately adjusting how it sat, centring the eye holes and tugging on the laces at the nape of his neck. Her body was warm against him, her breath played against his neck, they'd never been this close outside of battle or sparring and he had no idea what to do about it.

Her voice was so quiet he barely heard it, "Y-you sm-...you too."

Then she was walking past him to the table, tucking her hair up and under the long red wig she wore in costume after Oracle passed it to her. The information specialist tossed the rest of her team their wigs, blonde pigtails to Harlequin and messy black pixie cut with attached dog ears to Bitch. Brian didn't use a wig but the important part was one he could certainly do.

Brian closed his eyes and blew out a long breath, exhaling all the embarrassment and lingering warmth.

Grue opened his eye. The supervillain took in his partner and the team they allied with. His gaze swept over Vine without pause and he nodded to Oracle.

"Take us through it one more time?"

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Alec wasn't sure how he felt about this plan. On the one hand it was well thought out and the beat sounded fine to him. On the other hand it required him to dress in two layers of clothing and leave most of his armour off. Not exactly his idea of appropriate combat attire. Then again his ideal combat attire was not being in combat to start with, he'd grown used to the disappointment.

The target was as they'd been expecting, copious amounts of glass fronted the building and made it easy to look inside the lobby. The late hour meant there was no-one inside but a few cleaners and the two guards on desk duty, all of them pulsing with a slow rhythm of boredom, tiredness and general monotony that laid down the bass line for the whole building.

It took another minute for Alec to pick out the much more active rhythm of the ground floor guard patrol, then he smiled. It was time to liven up their music a bit.

Tugging the balaclava down over his face, Alec strode confidently out of his alleyway and across to the lobby of the Medhall Main Offices. He shook the spray cans in each hand in an alternating beat, aiming his path at the stretch of grey wall off to the edge of the building and out of direct sight of the lobby guards. Of course they'd have seen him approach, but he was currently more intent on his blank canvas than anything else.

It occurred that he probably should have decided on a subject before approaching, the notes of the near patrol had already shifted and he would need at least a rough sketch by the time they got to him. The urgency sent his mind back a few years and Alec snorted at a rare happy memory involving his Tinker elder sister and her favourite book.

The rough lines of the rabbit were done in moments. Then it was just a matter of doing everything else in his own time, taking care to match each movement to the paired song that was getting closer every second. There were too many differences for him to match either one exactly but he could get a good compromise going, something easily shifted to match one of them precisely.

_beat, beat, beat, pause, beat, pause, pause, be-beat, beat_

Out of the corner of his eye he saw the guards exiting the lobby, feigning ignorance of their arrival as he bobbed his concealed head. As hoped, they quickly dismissed the tagger not wearing gang colours as a threat. One of them went off the other way to do the street portion of their patrol while they were here (or at least so Alec assumed, his song still had the patrolling rhythm so he probably wasn't off for a smoke) and the other came his way with more than a note of violence.

His gun was pointed down though, his finger on the guard and not the trigger. Poor bastard was fingering the baton on his belt, but he clearly didn't see a real threat to him.

Alec kept right on going, still pretending he hadn't noticed the guard and was absorbed in music. Well that last part was true, it just wasn't headphones he was listening to.

The guard reached for his shoulder but it was already too late for him, the song was matched perfectly and now Alec shifted his movements to bring out a slightly different tune. The guard followed along without any sign of alarm, pulling back his arm and tapping his foot to a beat that was absent from the quiet night air.

_'Just need to seal the deal.'_

He couldn't be bothered with lyrics, instead Alec stuck with humming a few bars then listening to the response the guard hummed back to him.

_'More militaristic, there's a bit of marching to it.'_

He could work with that. Switching to whistling he tossed the guard one of the cans and swept his own along in a sharp arc. The next arc was copied by the other man, and then he was singing in butchered German while he helped Alec create some street art.

The Conductor had his first vocalist.

The rabbit was only half done when the other half of the patrol came back into sight, which was annoying but probably his own fault for not just going with a few dick sketches or badly spelled slurs. The guard didn't seem to appreciate his friend helping out, speeding up his walk and calling out to the singing man, but he was already halfway into the song himself and was barely even paying attention to the dumb kid with the spray paint. Alec wasn't worried about him snapping vocalist number one out of it.

By the time he had gotten close enough to try and shake his buddy out of it, the new arrival was singing right along with him. He gestured with his gun for lack of a spray paint can, so Alec carefully shifted things until he swapped it for his baton. A gunshot would be loud enough to fuck up everything, though the extending club whistling through the air didn't feel much safer to him.

Making a mental note to complain bitterly at Brian for all this, he directed his vocalists to the lobby doors in the most natural looking march he could manage. Standing between them with his head down was enough to keep the guard at the desk and the cleaner off to one side from reacting when they came into view, other than the former buzzing them through the doors. Slipping through the entrance put them in the expansive lobby of Medhall Pharmaceuticals, a column of open space extended from the marble floor to the skylight high above them, ringed by inner windows to keep noise from carrying upwards. Inside there weren't even the sounds of the city at night, just still air and the distant hum of ventilation.

When the vocalists announced their arrival by belting out an impromptu duet that changed, but Alec was already moving.

He threw the remaining spray can underarm while whistling very carefully in time with the desk guards tune. This was the pivotal moment. If he hit the alarm they were fucked, also he would probably be able to snap the singing guards out of the song and then they'd be really unhappy with their Conductor. The guard caught the spray can reflexively and slid back on his desk chair a few feet.

Alec had to stop himself from holding his breath, he kept up the low whistling beneath the duet, even as steps and song announced the guard at the elevator bank was incoming and probably wouldn't be bemused for long.

Then the desk guard surged to his feet and practically exploded with a genuinely impressive baritone, spraying wildly with the can in wide passionate arcs. His chair clattered to the floor behind him, the cleaner collapsed to the floor looking like she was about to wet herself and when the elevator guard came around the corner all three guards extended their hands -and voices- to him imploringly and he was practically pulled into the song.

Before the cleaner could get her voice in order, Alec was sliding over to her in time with the tune. He grabbed her hand and clutched it in both of his, then in his most romantic tenor he sang softly to her, "Meine Liebling, ich habe dich gefunden!"

The awful, awful quality of his German did nothing to stop her from swooning dramatically. All four guards surrounded them in synchronised choreography and began marching on the spot while they sang what he was pretty sure was a song about a soldier and his lost love. Something folksy and sappy at least, his power went back and forth between tapping into actual music in memories or just getting people to make shit up as they went along, so the specifics would probably always be a mystery.

_'Well now I think about it,'_ Alec thought while guiding the dance towards the desk; _'they might be able to put the song together from memory afterwards, maybe they'll translate it?'_

Slipping out of the circle of guards the cleaner pirouetting from one to the next to the next, Alec slid over the desk and got to work. Always careful to keep his movements to the tune, every keystroke and tap of the foot building his power stronger and stronger through them. Even the tapping of his fingers as he texted the all clear was just one more instrument in his own personal orchestra. Though the music itself had been given to him by Oracle, every password and shortcut he needed to get into the main security system.

He deactivated every alarm he found and had access to, eventually navigating through to the camera feeds and shutting those off too. Though he left a few up on his terminal only when he found they showed a lovely view of the vault entrance six stories below them.

It was set at the end of a corridor of blank cement and guarded by a full six men with sub-machine guns. There was none of the dullness found in the lobby guards, all of them were laser focused on the elevator that Alec had to swap cameras to see. Which sucked for them as it meant not one of them had noticed the tiny flower sprouting from the wall between the vault door and the nearest of them to it. Alec squinted at the little bud, it looked pretty innocent if you didn't know what it signified, then he grinned widely at the silent alert that popped up on his phone's screen.

The below ground team responded to Oracle's message a lot more dramatically, the flower shot back into the wall, then that entire section of the wall disintegrated into a vortex of dark grey roots. The camera feed was silent and the tremor-sensors were disabled. In his seat the only sounds were the continuing four part serenade, but the noise in that confined corridor must have been pretty extreme.

The guards reacted fast, but Brian and Bitch reacted faster.

His friend tore through the roots looking like the poster child for steroid abuse (though no where close to the levels of muscled giant he had seen the guy get to) and with darkness swirling across his body. He tore past the first two guards and barrelled into the other four in an explosion of smoky blackness. The ones he had ignored swivelled to fire into the dark only for Bitch to pounce out of the remaining roots and onto the back of one of the men.

She had clearly started using her power on the suit Vine made for her, the thing was less catsuit and more bone-plated power armour. Despite appearances she didn't tear her victim apart, instead kicking off him -the force throwing him into the wall- to twist through the air over the other guy. She grabbed his neck in mid air and he found himself bent over backwards with an arm tight against his throat. The one against the wall staggered to his feet but obviously didn't have a shot through his choking friend. He drew a stun-gun and rushed to his colleague's aid only for Bitch to roll out from under her human shield and sweep a leg in behind his own.

His knees buckled and she had the stun-gun out of his hands before he hit the ground. Two swift tasings followed, Bitch crouching over her foes with a feral grin. She was clearly about to charge into the Brian's darkness when it dispersed to reveal him surrounded by four men slumped and snoring. Each of them had ropes of liquid black oozing sluggishly from their skin, the product of being drained by Grue's power and a sure sign that they'd be waking up with splitting headaches then feel weak for about a week.

Brian gestured and the stuff gathered around him, then poured itself into the gas cylinder strapped to his back. Bitch nodded to him and whistled a particular note, the cue for Vine to come out of the fresh tunnel with two of Bitch's dogs trailing her.

Alec glanced back up at the dancers, then settled back in the seat with a lazy sigh. He kept his foot tapping along but things looked to be quiet from here on. The alarms were killed, the vault would be compromised in minutes and they'd be off with their loot. He hadn't even had to put most of his costume on.

_'Life is goo-'_

The alarm wasn't painfully loud, but it damn sure was attention grabbing. He barely started singing in time to keep his hold on the guards and cleaner, letting the song change with the alarm instead of fighting it. They responded by bringing up theirs guns and ushering the woman back towards the desk, Alec slid out from behind it and ensured the song would keep her firmly curled up behind it. No point in her getting hurt in whatever was coming. A whistle had all four of them standing in front of him as a makeshift shield, humming but keeping still with weapons raised.

He didn't spare a thought for what had gone wrong to have the alarm ringing. There were much more important things to worry about.

Like the dozen guards in full combat gear who stormed into the room behind _fucking Skytiger_.

The heavily tattooed gladiator was wearing jeans and nothing else, a sharp contrast to the neatly outfitted troops taking firing positions, though the distance they kept from him made it clear who the most dangerous party was.

He hadn't transformed yet, but that wasn't much comfort. His song was simple, but there was no way Alec would have time to subvert it before he closed the gap. Alec had a few gun hands and the taser in his pocket, but the gladiator could tear through concrete and fly. Not to mention he probably wouldn't care much about hostages.

In short, this was not a fight he could win.

Alec stepped through the centre of his own group, they didn't move far from him though so he still had them as cover from gunfire. He casually reached up and peeled off the balaclava, revealing his own opera-themed mask concealing his upper face, this was a conversation worth some theatrics.

"So are you guys on Medhall's pay or something? Nazis and drug companies is the kind of combination you see in horror films."

The voice that came out of Skytiger's mouth was a shock, not some violent growl but a crisp and cultured rumble. "Conductor. You are not as funny as you seem to think you are. You are also about to die."

_'Now that's just hurtful.'_

"Wow, how much do you smoke? You sound like a barrel of gravel going through puberty."

"Do you make jokes to seem courageous? Your fear is not as well hidden as you seem to think, I can smell it boy."

"I'm compensating? That's rich coming from the walking advertisement for every cheap tattoo parlour in the city. How many needle disease do you have?"

This time he got a reaction, the Empire cape stepped forward and his skin rippled. His arms twisted and sprouted a thick membrane from their underside, fingers becoming thick claws. Then as quickly as it began the changes were gone and he was entirely human again.

"No. No I think we shall just shoot you. Much easier to explain that way. Not that a child stupid enough to walk in here would understand such concerns."

"Ah, but I know something that you don't."

"Really? Does it have anything to do with bullets and them not killing you?"

Alec lazily extended his middle finger, then switched to his index to point straight up at the glass high above them. "The skylight's open." He drawled.

Then he stepped back behind his vocalists and had them close ranks as Harlequin made her entrance.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Sitting on a gravel covered rooftop a few dozen stories in the air was less than fun. Having to stick to the sole spot on that roof that wasn't covered by cameras did not make it any more fun.

Emma had consoled herself that as tight as it clung, her costume was at least pretty damn cosy. Then she'd gone ahead and sulked anyway, toying with the withered remains of the long vine that had pulled her up to the roof.

The buzz of her phone (the work phone, her real phone was much cuter looking and was never ever going on a job with her) informed her the cameras were down after what felt like hours. Her cue to kick open the skylight and get ready.

She stretched in her usual routine, flexing and bending in ways that made boys look at her with a whole lot of interest and, more importantly, got her modifications to start up. The strength and speed that normally slept in her limbs woke up and demanded movement, yet despite the tension her heartbeat was slowing more with every beat. Her senses stayed about the same, but her awareness of them went through the roof, it was exhilarating. It would probably drive her mad if she was like this all the time, but in brief bursts it felt incredible.

She thanked Taylor internally, not for the first time and not for the last. Then she checked her costume was in good shape as well, she had decent regeneration but her toughness was no better than any other teenage girl in good shape. The clinging suit ensured that a bullet would only fracture ribs and not kill her outright, as long as it was intact at least. Satisfied that it was, she flicked the fist sized bud that hung from her right wrist to wake up her weapon.

Its single long root uncoiled from her arm and wrapped around her hand instead. The bud swelled to the size of a volleyball and shifted its petals restlessly. She stroked it and murmured reassurances, not that it could understand her or anything. It just felt like the thing to do given how often it had saved her life. Another thing to thank Taylor for.

The alarm was quiet this high up, but it was unmistakeably a sign that shit had gone wrong and she needed to bail out Conductor. She peeked carefully down at the lobby and watched a bunch of men troop out of an internal door, it took her a few seconds to recognise Skytiger with sixty stories between them but she smiled when she did.

Then she took a deep breath and rolled through the open skylight.

She straightened her body and angled herself so her head pointed at the ground. The position let her aim but the roar of air was no joke. Emma could barely draw in a breath, her eyes watered despite her mask and the ground blurred even as it came towards her like a freight train.

Squinting let her make out her target, she shifted her weight to correct her course, then she tucked herself into a ball and rolled in the air. Her feet were below her and her weapon was beneath them, the root clamped between her insteps. The floors flashed by, Skytiger was mere feet below her when she finally commanded her weapon to flower.

Taylor had explained it a few times, but all the talk of reading pulse and nerve activity just went over her head. Emma preferred to see it as a mind-reading weapon and be done with it. Either way, no sooner had she thought it then the bud near-instantly bloomed into a disc about half as wide as she was tall.

Skytiger was flattened beneath the disc and the marble floor cracked and shattered in a hail of debris. By all rights Emma should have splashed with the force of the impact, instead her weapon absorbed the kinetic force completely and sent every shred of it downwards. It felt no different than the dismount from a high bar.

Of course those dismounts didn't often happen in the midst of more than a dozen men with guns. Which was just one more reason why her costumed life was so much better than her normal one.

Emma laughed from the bottom of her heart, then she chose her target at the edge of the group and launched herself into a backflip. Her weapon returned to a bud hanging from her right fist while she was in the air, it couldn't flower for too long at a time or it got damaged.

She came down standing on her first victim's shoulders, at which point the rest of those present snapped out of their shock and all hell broke loose.

Conductor sent his four thralls charging forwards at the men on the side of the room closest the lobby doors. Meanwhile most of them pointed their guns firmly at Emma and she barely dropped to sit on his shoulders in time to avoid the first bullets. She clinched her legs then twisted back and to the side, throwing him into a horizontal spin through the air.

She let go and fell to the floor in a roll, coming up inches from the other man on her side of the room who was standing alone. She ducked his instinctive haymaker and sidestepped to put him between herself and all the guns. The position gave her a good view of the chaotic melee Conductor had made of six of the men, not to mention the way her own share were circling to get a shot at her, but she refused to be distracted from her current opponent.

He swung at her again, this time she got her weapon in the way and the blow hit it with what felt to her like all the force of a tumbling feather. He kept swinging, right, left, left, right, left, she was too close for any technique and he didn't think to grapple, only to keep stepping back to try and get more distance. Every hit she could block with her weapon she did, the rest she slipped through to keep pushing him back.

He didn't realise how close he had gotten to two of the others until they came around either side of him to mob her, exactly what she'd been hoping for as it kept her covered from the two across the lobby and still looking for a clear shot. Letting the first guy stagger back with a shove to help him on his way, Emma turned her attention to her two new friends with a smile that crinkled her mask.

They answered it with a knife from the guy on her right and the butt of a machine gun from the guy between her and the would-be shooters. She side-stepped close to Mr Gun-butt, out of the way of the knife swing, under the gun-butt's arc, and pivoted to put her back to his chest. His two-handed grip on his gun meant his arms were on either side of her, she ignored that and drove her heel into the knife-wielder's gut hard enough to throw him a few feet.

The arms around her became a tightening grip, the punch happy guy coming back from her shove with a knife of his own. Emma planted the heel she had put in knifey's gut and hurled her other leg into a vertical split. The ball of her foot broke her captor's nose, then she brought her foot back down on punch happy's knife hand. Throwing her arms apart broke broken nose's grip -as well as sending the machine gun flying up into the air- and let her step forward with her descending foot, then smash her opposite fist into punch happy's face and clothesline his charge.

She pivoted and kicked broken nose's knee into bending the wrong way. He went down on the other one with a sobbing yell, exposing her upper body to the remaining two shooters. She was already raising her left arm and bringing her right arm back in a rising arc when her weapon's root abruptly straightened and lengthened into a pole almost her own height. She grabbed the handle in both hands while continuing the same arc. The newly formed hammer slipping into position to slam into the gun -thrown into the air when she broke broken nose's hold- that was falling back down towards her.

She let it release most of the energy that had been built up with the earlier hail of punches, the gun deformed around the impact and shot straight for the gunmen. It took one in the gut and put him entirely out of the fight, the other flinched away from his partner and looked at him instead of Emma for an instant. When he looked back she had already planted a foot on broken nose's shoulder and used him as a spring board, her weapon flowered to block the wild gunfire sent her way.

She landed close enough to have the shooter throwing himself backwards across the floor, crouching to keep her entire body behind the shielding petals. He clicked empty and she charged.

He didn't reload in time.

Emma glanced in every direction looking for more threats, but found nothing but a lot of groaning or still gunmen on her side of the lobby and a dogpile of weakly humming shapes over on Conductor's. The smart-ass was standing casually off to one side of the pile, waving his hands in time with their humming.

Ass that he might have been, she gave him a cheerful wave and was glad to see him return it. Victory always felt good.

An ominous crumbling informed her that she may have counted her chickens a bit too early, it was coming from the marble crater that marked her entrance. Conductor edged a bit closer while she threw caution to the wind and walked right up to it.

So she had a great view of the monster that hauled itself out of the rubble. Looking like a bat in the same way a werewolf might look like a dog, it was half again her height and covered in coiled muscle beneath course looking fur. The black markings on grey fur identified it as Skytiger even if the were-bat thing hadn't, but it was the eyes that had fear stirring in Emma's gut.

Those eyes were smart, and they were merciless. They had memories stirring in the places she didn't let her thoughts stray, the places she had fought to be free of.

So she threw out an arm as Conductor started to step closer. So she didn't flinch when Skytiger spread his wing-arms and his claws tore easily into the marble. So she met his gaze head-on.

"No need for your help Sing-song, Mr Batty's mine."

Skytiger roared and she charged with a wild laugh.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Being brave was important, more important even than living.

That didn't mean it was the same thing as being stupid though. So Emma did not charge with any intent of actually meeting Skytiger head-on, instead she waited for the inevitable strike of a claw-tipped wing and leapt sideways into it. Her weapon blunted the impact and kept it from bisecting her, but instead of letting it eat all the force and leave her hanging in the air and open for the next hit, she rode the rest of the attack and let it throw her across the lobby.

At the angle she was charging, he was either going to hit her towards the doors or the elevators. She'd been hoping for the latter and he hadn't disappointed. The marble floor came up fast enough that she couldn't get her weapon under her, having to roll and grit her teeth at the bruising force of her landing. Still she was up and around the corner into the elevator corridor before he could pursue her.

That wouldn't last, his footfalls were coming towards her fast and heavy as she looked around the elevators. Four plain elevator doors on each side of the corridor in paired banks, a much fancier frame all scroll work and tasteful hints of gold- surrounded the elevator at the end of the corridor. She sprinted for the executive elevator just as Skytiger made it round the corner.

He didn't take any time to look around, instead he snapped out his wings to scrap against the walls on either side and charged right at her. If she hadn't already been running then his speed would have had him caught up before she made it halfway down the corridor. Her head start was still only going to have her running into the executive lift a moment or two before he crushed her, the doors would never open that quickly.

Emma leapt at the wall when she was a pace from running into it. One foot lead and found a foothold on the decorated frame, she propelled herself up the wall and put her next foot down on the frame's top edge. Skytiger was rearing up to deny her escape even as his claws scraped at the floor and walls to try and bring him to a halt, she needed more height and kicked out while cycling her other leg upwards to get a few more precious feet. Then she planted both feet against the wall and bent her body into as tight a spring as she could.

There was no time to check if she was high enough. She rebounded blindly off the wall and found herself brushing the upper edges of Skytiger's wings. Then she was landing and he was charging straight into the elevator doors. His attempts at slowing down had proved futile.

She didn't give him time to recover and pull his head out of the twisted ruin of the executive elevator doors. No sooner had she landed behind him than she was rushing back at him, spinning her weapon in hammer form over her head. She landed a heavy, though not boosted, blow to his back, then had to roll to the side as he started kicking wildly and redoubled his efforts to yank his head out of the doors. She managed a few glancing hits to his legs, still not wasting any of the built up energy, then a flicker in the corner of her vision had her ducking just in time. He had swept his wings back clumsily and clearly couldn't tell where she was, but the claws would still have taken her head off if she hadn't moved. He kept up the thrashing with both legs and wings, scraping against the corridor and wrecking the floor.

_'Fuck he's dangerous! Guess they don't call him Hookwolf's partner for nothing.'_

The same impulse that had driven her to refuse Conductor's help now drove her to take a breath and dive forwards rather than fleeing like she really should have. She'd like to say that she wanted to make sure that her friends had the time they needed to complete the job, but really she just refused to run. Holding her hammer low she dashed in, ducked a wing then vaulted a sweeping leg to land between his thighs and in a very bad position if he tried bringing them together. Before he could realise where she was Emma struck first, slamming her hammer up between his legs and discharging every bit of force she had stored up.

The impact sounded like a steak being tenderised and lifted Skytiger two feet into the air with a keening wail. She launched herself into backwards cartwheels before he could retaliate, then backed up a lot further when he braced all four limbs against the corridor and finally heaved himself out of the pillory he had made for himself. Wheeling in the confines of the corridor should have proved difficult with his bulk but he did it carefully and swiftly, no longer hurling himself carelessly around. He looked at her with seething hate and Emma had the distinct impression from his stillness that he was taking her very seriously now.

She hadn't really looked at Skytiger until then, more concerned with staying alive than a close examination. Now that she did her nickname felt wrong. Really he'd chosen his name well because despite his overall shape he better resembled a tiger than a bat, bats were cute (no matter how many terrifying capes themed themselves after them) and the monster before her most definitely was not. The large ears were tattered and torn, his snout so full of teeth that it seemed impossible that he could close it and his wings better resembled long arms with too many joints and an underslung membrane tacked on as an afterthought. One of those arms drew in close, moving carefully and slowly, to his patterned chest and traced one of the many long straight scars there. Then he revealed their origin by digging in a claw and carving a fresh wound across his chest.

His voice caught her off guard, growling each word for a while before spitting it out, but getting them out recognisably, "Theeeerrre giiirrrl, IIIIIIII'vve blllllleeehd. Yoooouuur tuuuurrrn."

Then he flicked his claw and her vision went blank red as something hot splashed into her mask and soaked her face. She had a brief moment to admire his accuracy and then she was desperately bringing up her weapon in shield form to block his rush. The charge was stopped, but the whistle of his claws in the air to either side of her had her shrinking it back down and diving forward before he could tear into her sides. Her roll crashed into one of his legs and she was throwing herself to one side before she finished thinking of the threat of being stepped on. A crash and shaking of the floor told her she'd barely escaped as she ended up against the wall. Returning her weapon to shield form let her shift it from side to side and protect the lower corner she was curled up in but it would only be so long before he realised it could only block spikes of force, not constant pressure.

She drew a utility knife from the back of her belt and worked it one handed into the material over her eyes. The material was thinnest there to give her full vision and she tore a pair of holes with only a few nicks to the skin of her face, then she dropped the knife, grabbed a scrap of cloth and rubbed at her eyes as fast as she could. Then just as the rain of blows was becoming more of a crushing press she tucked herself against the floor and kicked off the wall to slide beneath him, a plan forming in her mind.

The elevator corridor was proving to favour him more than her. It limited his movements but denied her the room to take advantage of that. So when she rolled backwards from her back to her feet, she immediately hit the call buttons for the elevator pair nearest to her.

He whirled on her and immediately began pressing her again, attacking too fast for her to break away, so she didn't even try. Instead she circled him, dodging and blocking the constant flurry of claws, occasionally stepping in to lash out with one of her own blows and let the accumulated force drive him back briefly while she took a few steps to the side. She hit the call buttons whenever she could and by her count it had been a little over a minute when that finally paid off. An elevator dinged and she feinted towards it as the doors slid open.

Skytiger rushed to stop her and she went for the other side of the corridor while he struggling with his momentum once again. Her luck was in and one of the doors slid open right in front of her, letting her dive in, bounce off the far wall and smack the button to close the doors. They slid shut inches from his snout.

Of course the door buckled a foot inwards a moment later and claws pierced the weakened centre. She'd expected it though, grabbing the lip of the roof vent and kicking herself up through it by the time he wrenched open the doors.

The elevator shaft consisted of the columns of space for two elevators side by side, the one she stood on and another that was high in the building, separated by a few feet of space with occasional horizontal girders and pipes in it. The edges had plenty of ventilation grates and ledges built in along with a ladder up the short side nearest to her. She leapt for it and started climbing as fast as she could to get as high as possible before the inevitable happened.

Sure enough Skytiger tore out the elevator like it was made of cheap tin then wasted no time grabbing the ladder and tearing the entire thing from the wall, including the part she was holding on to.

Jumping free she found herself on a ledge almost three floors above him, then she was jumping for one of the crossing girders as he tore off a piece of the ladder and hurled it at her. She was jumping again as soon as she had the footing, flipping to another ledge then up a few feet to grip a vent and then back down a foot to catch herself on a pipe that groaned at her weight.

All her dodging didn't amount to much gain in height as she was forced to prioritise dodging thrown debris over picking out her next steps. When he took a few seconds to climb instead of throwing stuff at her she moved faster up the shaft but it still seemed like he was gaining on her slowly.

When the gap was barely two storeys and they were almost ten floors up, Emma resorted to climbing the cables. Not the ones attached to the elevator wrecked below them, she had no confidence in their durability against Skytiger's strength, but the ones attached to the elevator high enough that she could just barely see it up the dim shaft. The cables were looser than she had expected with a rough texture that made climbing easy. She had gained a full story on him when a ripple up the cables nearly tore her off them.

Looking down she found him braced against both sides of the single shaft she was climbing and gripping the cables in two bunches. One in each hand. She picked out the cables of one bundle and kept going climbing only via those, only to realise too late the trap she had fallen for. He hurled himself in a circle around the shaft, keeping hold of the cables and twisting them into a tight spiral that quickly reached her. Before she could respond she had been caught in the twisting lines. The cable above her was pulled taunt by the twisting and competed her prison. Smirking ferally up at her he switched to holding the cables in a single hand and tore out a chunk of the wall with the other. He hurled it without further delay, straight at her.

Emma went to block it with her weapon in shield form but the angle was wrong, the cable got in her way and she barely jerked her legs aside before it could shatter her calves. Rather than let him destroy her a piece at a time she switched it to hammer form and focused her attention completely on his free arm. The next projectile she struck from the air. Then the next and the next and the next.

He didn't keep his cool for long, starting to shake the cables to throw off her blocks. Then in a fit of obvious rage he yanked on it. Hard.

She had an instant's imagining of herself cut in half by the cable, but the force transmitted around her without much pressure. One of the cables snapped just above her, whipping off to catch on a cross pipe and hang in a loop a few feet from her, the rest went loose and dropped for split-second then went taunt again. The slam of metal on metal echoed down the shaft and she remembered one time she and Taylor had been in an elevator and her friend had talked her ear off about the safety mechanisms that kept them from falling even if their cables snapped.

She got ready for more high stakes tennis only to find Skytiger wasn't bothering with any more projectiles. Instead he started to yank on the cables again, then again and then when that had no further effect he braced himself and let his body fall upside down. His feet dug into the walls of the shaft and he grunted comically as he strained against the hanging cables. A groan of tortured metal from high above her wiped the humour from her thoughts.

She started struggling to get out but the cables still held her tightly. The loop of cable on pipe caught her eye but it was out of reach.

_'...I'm an idiot.'_

She swung out her hammer and caught the cable easily with the head, pleased to find that it was wrapped firmly enough around the cross pipe that it held when she tugged on it. A few good pulls and she'd be fr-

_kaCRUNCH_

The hammer's shaft tore from her loose grip as she abruptly entered free fall.

The elevator screeched against the sides of the shaft as it fell. Emma barely choked back a screech of her own. She'd lost her weapon. It wasn't like she had any powers of her own, her boosts weren't enough to stand up to a multi-storey fall, let alone having an elevator fall on her afterwards. She wasn't special like the others. She was just Emma Barnes and she was going to go splat and that would be...

"_Look at this little bitch, think one of the farms__could get a few bucks for her?"_

No.

"_You're the girl from today. The fuck__do you want with me?__" _

"_I- I brought some bandages and stuff."_

"_I don't care, just leave me alone. Whatever you want for them I'm not giving you it."_

"_N-no. I just..."_

No!

"_Hey Emma I, I'm sorry for not being there for you. I know you're mad and I d-deserve it but-__"_

"_Shut up and l-let me give you a hug you big goof. I'm the one who should be sorry, not...not even thinking to phone you and say I was okay. C-come on, stop cr-crying, y-you're getting snot a-all over me."_

"_Y-y-" hic "-you stop crying first."_

Not a chance in hell.

"_Come on Ta- I mean Vine. We're gonna get through this. Then we're going to go buy the biggest ice cream Mama Gelato has on the menu. Now how about a big flower for me to get onto that roof?"_

She was Emma fucking Barnes! She was an asskicker extraordinaire!

_"I vote 'The Sirens'."_

_"What's wrong with 'Flower Power'?"_

_"Siren mean something?"_

_"Well I think 'Flower Power' is- Ah, The Sirens were legendary monsters-"_

_"Nah, it's not anything about the meaning. It's just...it sounds pretty cool doesn't it."_

_"I guess it's almost as good as 'Flower Power', as team names go."_

_"It sounds badass. Let's go with it."_

The Harlequin would not die so easily.

"_Emma...you...thanks. For getting me patched up, that fight was bad and I'd probably...Well thank you alright."_

"_It's cool. You saved me first remember."_

"_Hmph, that was months ago already...Hey, what happened to your eye? Who the hell did that to you?!"_

"_Settle down dammit, you're the one who got stabbed! Anyway, I'm fine. Just a bump is all."_

"_...you fuck them up for it?"_

"_Damn right."_

She yanked on the cables falling alongside her, hauling them through her hands as fast as she could until the line went tense, no more loose between her and the falling elevator. Pulling on it again with every ounce of strength she could muster redirected her from free fall into a slightly slower fall, but one heading straight for a ledge on the short side of the shaft. If the elevator had been coming down normally she'd have stopped there and flatten herself against the ledge, but it was coming down loose, scraping the walls on the way, she'd be crushed.

A glance in mid-jump told her that the other shaft was no option either, Skytiger had made considerable distance up it while she was falling and was high enough to intercept her if she tried crossing to the other shaft.

Which was why she was leaping upwards the moment she touched the ledge, ignoring the jolt of pain at landing from such a fall. Her knees screamed with every new landing but she tuned it out and kept going. She kept her grip on the cables, pulling herself up as often as she jumped. Her target was two floors above her, the elevator was close enough to be visible even in the gloomy shaft. The race was on.

A floor and a half to go, she hauled on the cables just in time to dodge a lump of metal headed for her original target.

A floor to go, she heard Skytiger start climbing as well. There was no point looking back at him, he'd either beat her up or he wouldn't.

Half a floor to go, the elevator was incredibly loud, the edges spewed sparks where they scraped along the walls of the shaft. So many that she wondered if they'd set the building on fire.

She had hit a blank patch of wall, marked only by the keyhole of a maintenance hatch of some kind. The best footholds were in the long walls of the double shaft, too much of a detour, she'd lose all her momentum.

_'No more hesitation.'_

The hatch deformed with the force of her foot against it and she was leaping out into the shaft.

Time slowed, or she saw it that way at least. The falling metal box was close enough that she could almost feel weight on her skin, but her target was close to. Her beloved hammer, dangling from a tangled length of cable that hung in between the two individual shafts. Only now, with her hands almost around the shaft of her weapon, could she see Skytiger had leapt too. He must have waited for the last moment to have matched her trajectory so perfectly.

Shame he didn't think it through a bit more.

She caught the haft and swung on it, clearing the dangerous shaft with seconds to spare and heading straight for Skytiger's waiting jaws and claws. He was so busy looking at her triumphantly that he never saw the head of her hammer slipping beneath the edge of the elevator with barely a half inch of clearance. The metal caught up to it an instant later, shoving the hammer's head downwards and Emma only let the weapon take a fraction of the impact force. Enough that it didn't simply tear loose the hanging cable, instead the hammer rotated about it, the cable still only acted as a fulcrum briefly before it snapped from the strain.

It was long enough for the force to bring her swinging up over Skytiger and throw her almost straight up the shaft. Her weapon trailed behind her in it's relaxed form, along with the laugh that bubbled out of her chest bright and strong.

Beneath her, almost hidden by rushing air all around her, Emma heard the clear thud of Skytiger slamming face first into the side of the falling elevator. Followed shortly after by the echoing _boom_ of the metal hitting the sub-basement.

_'Life is good.'_

She must have cleared the twentieth floor before she hit her peak, careful to keep her weapon ready if she drifted to close to the sides. Instead she managed to land pretty lightly on one of the cross girders. It gave her a moment to catch her breath, unfortunately a roar below her made it clear that she really only had that moment.

The falling elevator had really messed up the shaft, a door just a floor below where she stood had been torn apart by...a corner? It didn't really matter, what did was that she could see a wide open office space beyond the ruin of the doors. Emma stayed just long enough to ensure Skytiger was climbing up to her and could see what floor she left on.

Barely half a minute passed before he tore through the doors and...found himself alone in the sea of cubicles that stretched from the glass of the outer windows to that of the building's empty inner column. A few support pillars broke it up here and there, but as he crept forward through the maze he could see no sign of her.

Or at least that was what Emma assumed, what with how he completely failed to react to her until she sprinted out from between two cubicles and smacked her hammer home in his ribs. She kept right on going past him and dived back into concealment. His attempts at following her found him quickly tangled in a mess of computers and chairs and broken desks and wires and who knew what else. His bulk was nothing but a disadvantage here.

Her hits were comparatively light for something as tough as him, only her own strength behind them for now, but they kept coming. Every time he tried to chase her but found he couldn't keep up. The ceiling was too low for him to stretch his wings, let alone fly or jump, the debris of the working day got in the way of every pursuit, all the while she slipped in and out of the air around him. Blow after blow after blow after blow.

Finally she was coming at his back when he rippled inwards, and a muscular human turned around where the monster had been. He caught her in a bear hug that made her very glad for her layers of clothing, since his transformation had left him without any.

"What the fuck are you going to do now little bi-!"

Her headbutt cut him off in a spray of blood from his nose. His grip didn't loosen much, he was too experienced for that, but it was enough for her to go down. Her weapon relaxed and she let her legs slip into a perfect front split. Her left leg went between his, she pushed off with her arms and other leg, sliding between his legs with her back flat to the floor and her eyes closed to keep the view to a minimum.

_'Eeeeeeewwww!'_

She rose smoothly behind him before he could get his bearings, punishing him for defiling her poor eyes with a sweeping upcut of her hammer. He staggered back at the punishment to his jaw, then came back strong in a combination of punches. They were fast, precise and powerful. She almost yawned.

Emma slipped beneath and between his fists, finally back in her combat element. She headbutted him again and he responded by trying to tackle her. Rather than risk grappling with a superstrong transformer, she launched herself up and to the side, planting a hand on the cubicle divider and cartwheeling along it.

She dropped behind him, back to his, and spun towards him. He responded with a skill, a textbook spinning back kick that she ducked easily beneath before rising into another uppercut of the hammer. This one hit his chest and nearly took him off his feet. Tough or not, the damage was piling up and he was only so heavy in his current form.

He must have had the same thought because he began rippling, she cut that nonsense off with a stunning strike of the base of her weapon's haft to his forehead.

_clunk_

The noise was like a pool cue hitting the ball, just a little deeper, the similarity made her giggle and when he shouted his anger at that she launched a kick of her own. Feinting it as heading for the apex of his legs she rechambered it midway and attacked his head again while he blocked low.

He staggered back again, this time going several steps before he caught himself. Woozy from all the hits. She had him.

Now she pressed her advantage, hitting him as fast and as hard as she could manage. She didn't let herself falter, he'd survived her falling from the roof onto him with barely any time at all to heal. No holding back against this guy.

A hammer blow punished his hand for attempting a punch.

He tried to kick and she stamped on his knee before it got a foot off the ground.

She cut off his attempt at fleeing by sweeping his legs out from under him.

Then a solid thrust caught him in the chest and he smacked solidly into the glass of the outer wall. Cracks spiderwebbed across it and they both looked behind him. They weren't even halfway up the building, but the street in front of the lobby doors still seemed a hell of a long way below.

His last attempt at a charge was spirited, Emma had to give him that. He rushed right through her first hit, much as it obviously cost him to do so, then ducked beneath the high kick she threw to cover pulling back the hammer. She just let the kick carry her around into a crouch and thrust the head of the hammer backwards, bracing the haft on her shoulder. It hit him solidly in the head, halting his charge. She tossed the weapon into a spin around her neck and pirouetted right along with it.

She knew from her regular practice that the showy move made the hammer look ridiculously fast. The dazed fighter did as she expected in the face of it, stepping back then again, before ducking left to try and hit her below it.

Emma planted her foot on the next spin, bent her other leg and caught the haft as it came around her neck. The head crashed into his chest dead centre.

She let out every scrap of force that she'd saved up since getting thrown up the shaft.

The window practically exploded with how fast he went through it.

He skimmed another office building across the street, cracking the windows and redirecting his trajectory out into the street. He hit the road, skipped off it twice and finally came to a halt when he smacked full on into a Medhall truck parked down the road. With the window broken, distant sirens drifted into the building, she couldn't hear anything much else but they sounded like they were getting closer.

Pulling out a lens from her belt pocket and peering closely at her fallen foe, Emma let out a tiny sigh when she saw him twitch a little. Then a much larger sigh when that was all he did.

"Skytiger, you racist douchbag...you are one tough son of a bitch."

If it were a movie then that would have been when her team called to say that they were getting the hell out of there. Since it was not a movie she got to spend nearly two minutes waiting in the chilly breeze coming in the window. She spent most of the time weighing down loose papers for lack of anything better to do. She'd already messed up their workstations enough for one night.

The sirens were getting way to close for comfort when her phone abruptly buzzed at her. Glad that it had survived the fight (and a little embarrassed she hadn't checked it sooner) Emma found a simple message waiting for her.

'Frnt st ASAP'

Peering out the broken window she found the first signs of one of Taylor's tunnel emergences forming in the plaza in front of the building.

_'Looks like Taylor's going to get in some public property damage after all.'_

More work for the East Coast Association's construction interests. Mr Hebert was going to be pretty pleased with his daughter.

_'Maybe he'll get that gourmet ice cream for the sleepover tomorrow. That would be awesome.'_

When the ground went from cracking to outright sinking into a crater, she leapt out into open air. There was no need for her weapon though, a vine thicker than most trees shot up from the churning ground and sprouted a very soft leaf with which to catch her. Taylor wasn't much for precision in the field, but the massive alien 'tree' rising up in front of the Main Medhall Offices was a testament to the sheer scale she could bring to the table.

Other leaves unfurled from the pods they had been forming, revealing the rest of her team one by one. Including Conductor, which she supposed explained why he hadn't even tried to help her a little. They looked as battle scarred as she was, but the sirens were too close for questions. The last three leaves revealed a trio of Rachel's dogs, fully buffed and ready to go.

When they were bounding over rooftops three blocks away and she, Lisa and Conductor (Angelica was injured and Rachel only trusted Rachel to ride alone) were sniggering over Grue and Taylor trying to act like they weren't flustered by sharing a mount, Emma finally threw her arms into the air and let her exultation loose into the night sky.

"Wooooooohoohoooooooooooooo!"

The voice that came from a few feet to her left, where there should have been nothing but open space beside them, was like a bucket of ice cold water.

"Am I interrupting something?" Growled the Bat. Scourge of the Brockton Bay underworld and the most feared hero on the East Coast. Gliding along beside them on a cloak that blended perfectly into the night.

They were scattering before he'd finished the first word. All except Rachel, who instead gave the most feral giggle Emma could imagine -despite having heard that giggle quite a few times in situations like these- and sprang off the leading dog to collide with the Bat in midair.

Unfortunately for Emma herself, shortly after rolling into a combat stance on the roof she had jumped off over, she noticed a tiny dart sticking out of her left shoulder. It had gone through a teeny tiny little tear in the fabric that she hadn't noticed until just now. She plucked it out and stared at it in wonder.

_'Hey! The fletchy thingies are shaped like baaaaaaaa...'_

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Taylor didn't waste time, not on jobs at least. The moment she heard Rachel's whistle she was out from behind the bend in the tunnel and stepping from dirt onto concrete with the dogs padding past her. Her shoes preferred the soil in the vague not-quite-thoughts that her power let her perceive, but she'd be back on soft ground soon enough.

She didn't spare a glance for the guards littering the corridor or look at her teammates for any longer than it took to ascertain they were unharmed. Grue- no, Brian's costume was as thrilling as ever but distractions were for times they weren't on the job. Well distractions for them were for other times, distractions for their enemies were definitely for on the job, the point was-

Her phone buzzed her back to reality. A message from Lisa that read like a random assortment of symbols but signalled that she'd done all she could via their Wi-Fi and would be packing up her laptop then heading down to meet them. Taylor tossed her phone to Brian and he set about rigging the elevator to allow Lisa passage down to them while she and Rachel focused on the vault door.

It was an impressive hunk of metal, a round slab of steel set in an equally metallic wall and set with three different lock types. The schematics had informed them that it was a full two feet thick and would open only with a retinal scan, two key cards and a ten digit code that changed daily.

As she urged her plants out of the tunnel and into spreading across every surface of the concrete tube they stood in, Taylor reflected that the security would have made a stealthy break-in into a complete nightmare. Fortunately with the external security shut down completely and the internal stuff set to ignore the door for ease of use, there was no need to bother unlocking the door. Instead she had a number of her oh-so-useful vines extend tiny little roots in at the edges the door and spread them on through it to cling to the other side. In seconds the door was coated in initial growth and she could tell her plants to grow properly.

As they began thickening Brian stepped up to the door in the middle of his own growth spurt, a tendril of his charged darkness fed from his store tank into his back, the fluid highlighted his veins as he grew past any normal human build. He grabbed the vines where she had shaped them into handholds and added his strength to the force straining the vault door.

With a squeal of tortured metal that would normally have set off every alarm in the building, the bolts failed and the door popped out of its frame. Brian stepped back with it in hand between him and her vines they set the door down against the wall and examined the revealed vault entrance.

It looked like a bank vault, one of the plain ones without much money lying around. Just lots of stainless steel and locked file draws. All except for the wall opposite the empty doorway, which was a futuristic mass of pipes and wires beneath thick perspex. The second door set in that wall was not as secure looking as the first but Taylor knew that it was not going to open the same way. For one thing it was totally air-tight and would have no gaps for roots to get in to the controlled environment on the other side. For another thing it led to a burn vault which was rigged with thermite charges that would go off the moment there was a possible breech, a necessary precaution for a vault designed for potentially containing viruses and the like.

The door was still ahead of them though, first they needed to reach it. Which meant bypassing temperature sensors, a pressure sensitive floor and roaming laser tripwires. Rachel gave a dismissive grunt from where she was peering over Taylor's shoulder and took several steps back while resettling her goggles and flicking a few hidden switches on their rim. Her suit would fool the temperature sensors for long enough and she'd already released her power and let it de-bulk. Still, no matter how often she saw her two teammates in their shared hobby, Taylor never stopped finding it weird when Rachel did this kind of thing.

Still she tossed her friend the suction pads and stepped out of the doorway as Rachel settled them on her hands and began bobbing her head to the rhythm of the lasers only she could see.

Brian was much less sure, "You can definitely get through the lasers right? We could always go get Harle-?"

Rachel cut him off by exploding into a sprint up the corridor. When she was less than a stride from the doorway she leapt, leading with her hands and holding her body horizontal in the air. She hit the opposite wall with the suction pads, the impact whisper quiet despite her speed, and curled into a crouch braced against the wall. She hit two digits on the pad then glanced over her shoulder at the room and abruptly rotated the suction pads to grip them with her fingers pointing down. With a soft grunt she lifted herself on just her arms, then tucked her head forward and smoothly transitioned to a hand stand supported by her grip on the path, back flat to the wall and her legs at a ninety degree angle that put them flush with the ceiling.

Despite the position her exposed mouth showed no sign of strain. Nor was there anything in her tone beyond a mild grumble, "What was the code again? Two-Six...?"

Taylor answered her, since Brian seemed a little tongue-tied at finally seeing Rachel showing off.

"Two-Six-Eleven-Seven-Four."

She quashed the swell of jealousy in her gut as Rachel grunted in acknowledgement and continued to hold the position while Brian continued to stare.

_'I can run a marathon in two and a half hours you know? That's pretty impressive too!'_

The lasers must have moved away because Rachel dropped from her pose with as little warning as she had gone into it with. She went back to tapping out the code and had it finished in moments. A brief chime sounded as the inner security shut down and the environmental systems began whirring through the opening sequence.

Well, Lisa had said that the internal security would shut down when the door opened, judging by how she still hadn't touched the floor, Rachel didn't exactly trust her blindly at her word. Rather than wasting time convincing her Taylor stepped boldly into the vault and very carefully didn't tense in anticipation of blaring alarms.

When the alarms really didn't go off Rachel finally dropped to the ground and flexed her fingers a few times before yanking the suction pads off the door and stowing them in one of her belt pouches. All three of them kept their attention on the door as it gave a final hiss of escaping air and clicked back into its frame before sliding open.

The rebreather-wearing guard on the other side looked as surprised to see them in the secure vault as they were to see him in a sealed room with no ventilation.

Rachel was diving out of the doorway before his pistol was halfway up, taking cover with the speed of instinct. Taylor found herself too far into the room to go back into the corridor in time, diving sideways wouldn't take her out of his line of sight and her plants wouldn't reach her fast enough to form a shield. She was staring down the rising barrel and hoping her costume was as bulletproof as she had intended it to be when she was shoved backwards and a small mountain interposed itself between her and the guard.

The alarms would have been deafening in the open, let alone in a small confined space like the vault. The gunshots were even worse, echoing against her ears like waves pounding the shore into submission, she clapped her hands over her ears and focused on forming the right parts of her costume into the adaptive earplugs that she had considered and even designed but ultimately decided against. Hindsight turned out to be very loud and then very quiet all of a sudden.

When she could hear herself think again, Taylor found Brian still standing in front of her where he had stepped in to act as her bullet shield and saved her from, at bare minimum, some nasty bruises. Since he didn't stop her from peering around his enhanced bulk she assumed that-

Yep, that guard definitely wasn't going to be doing much for a while. Rachel must have grappled him with her purloined stun-gun in hand. It was unclear if the blood choke or the repeated shockings had been what brought him down, but either way he was no longer a problem. The ongoing alarm however meant that a great many more problems would be on their way.

"Brian!" She had to speak loudly to be heard over the alarm.

Fortunately he didn't need her to say more, moving to cover the corridor while she and Rachel got busy in the inner vault. Which meant dragging the limp guard out first of all, then examining every inch of the room.

The abundance of technology visible in the outer vault was hidden from the inside by smooth steel walls. Other than maintenance panels they were unmarked, the storage in the burn vault was to be found entirely in a podium standing chest high in the centre of the room. The cylinder of metal and reinforced glass was divided into quarters, each with its own keypad and status screen. The secure storage for Medhall's prototype drugs and the more dangerous of their research materials, it was designed to trigger the charges in the inner vault walls if containment was breeched forcefully. Shaped explosives and a number of chemicals would instantly slag everything in the room without the slightest effect outside of it, a perfect defense against any contagions that might be contained within.

Of course at times when there was no such contagion being researched or contained, times like now, the security still acted as a potent defense against thieves. Forcing them to break through a sixteen digit rotating code to get at the prize. Taylor fingered the flash drive in her back pocket that carried Lisa's program for getting through the code, a program that she had estimated would take at least ten minutes.

Taylor found the right section of the podium and plugged it in beside the screen declaring that rohidopripranodopsin was being stored at the right temperature and was fully secure in its three identical vials. Then she stepped back and trod very deliberately on the alarm trigger that the guard had held in his off hand.

The burn couldn't be triggered externally -too much risk of industrial sabotage- but they still wouldn't have much time before guards arrived in force. Taylor hoped Lisa could find an alternate route out the building since the elevator was unlikely to make for the safe rendezvous they had intended to use it for.

Rachel distracted her from her worries with an appreciative whistle. Turning to face her, Taylor found the other girl had pried loose one of the maintenance panels and found much more than just a few wires and pipes on the other side. Resting against a plastic box that looked very much like the housing for one of the charges were a thick file folder and a matt black case.

"It looked wrong." Was all the explanation Rachel offered for how she had found the stash. Taylor didn't question it, her friend had impressive instincts for a thief and was far more observant than most people took her for. More importantly, what had she found?

The case was marked with a funny little 'C' symbol and had a combination lock they could open later. The files had no such security and were much more up front with their revelations.

They were Empire Eighty Eight member files, accounts and other ludicrously incriminating documents. Stored in a very secure Medhall vault, in a space that almost no one could possibly know about. That had some interesting implications all by itself.

Taylor directed Rachel to replace the panel and walked quickly back through the outer vault to the corridor where Brian and the dogs waited. Brutus had disobeyed his orders ever so slightly to poke his head around the tunnel corner and peer at the other two dogs where they sat on the concrete looking peaceful despite their monstrous bulk. Taylor went straight for Brutus and popped open the cargo pack hanging from his side. She nestled her precious loot in the padding within then triple checked it was secure. Patting Brutus and wishing she had a treat for him, Taylor started back towards the vaults.

She was just stepping back onto the concrete when the alarms cut out. She kept going, they had to shut off the noise eventually after all, and had just passed Brian when the elevator pinged.

She was behind him immediately, drawing the plants coating the corridor back into motion to redouble her protection before she peeked around him. She had hoped it was Lisa, seeing her friend in the clutches of the Empire's second-in-command made her wish she'd been more specific with her hopes. The sight of Krieg, Cricket and Hookwolf in the elevator wasn't necessarily surprising though. The files had already suggested a major link, this just further confirmed it. Though seeing the neat uniform that Krieg wore beside the tattered jeans and vests of the other two made for an interesting contrast.

Lisa swallowed around the gun -Taylor recognised it as Lisa's own- that the Waffen SS cosplayer was pressing against her throat, "Hey guys. I think this place might have links to the Empire."

Taylor was used to the mild urge to slap her smug friend upside her blonde head, seeing Hookwolf turn and sink his fist horribly far into her gut obliterated that urge. A burning desire to take the scar covered man apart replaced it and only roared higher when she noticed the bruises and scuff marks that spoke of Lisa's treatment at their hands. Maybe it was how they'd met, maybe it was just because she had none of the combat ability that the other Sirens did, but seeing Lisa retching and gasping for air felt profoundly wrong.

Cricket stepped forward, the cage around her head clinking with the swaying of her head. A briefing several months ago came to mind and Taylor remembered that the Empire villainess had an echo-sense just in time for her to hold a plastic tube to her throat and speak.

"The dog bitch can stop cowering and come out. I know you're there." The electronic voice was flat and steady in volume. It still managed to convey a sneer.

Rachel came out immediately, an ambush wasn't on the cards so-

_'Shit!'_

Taylor went to catch Rachel before the older girl and sort-of-leader of the Sirens could charge straight down the corridor, only for it to prove unnecessary. As soon as she got a good look at their captured friend and the gun pointed firmly at her, the dog-themed cape stopped cold and growled low in her throat.

"Really, you actually growl. So you sound like a dog and you look like a dog, do you fuck them too."

Rachel answered the ridiculous taunt -at least Taylor assumed they were taunts, the lack of tone made it a little hard to tell- by deepening her growl, her dogs joined in and Cricket hastily stepped back into the elevator. A slight smile broke across Lisa's face at seeing the empire cape forced to back down, not that the posturing got them anywhere.

It was Brian who took the initiative, unable to keep the scorn from his voice even as he kept his words polite, "So what now? Do we all just stand around until the white-hats get here?"

Hookwolf opened his mouth to say something undoubtedly brimming with slurs, only for Krieg to clear his throat and interrupt him before he could speak.

"I wouldn't be so smug if I were you. Unlike someone like you, we're perfectly capable of escaping the heroes, in this building and if you don't hurry up and give back...what you stole then you'll be dead, long before they get here. Also, boy, I wouldn't try your power, if I were you...even blind I can still pull a trigger."

Rachel and Brian tensed at his words but Taylor only really noticed how strange the rhythm of his speech was, stopping and starting and pausing for no apparent reason. Mostly though, she was focused on slowly twining her vines across the floor of the outer and inner vaults and up around the secure podium. It was as difficult as ever to get any kind of precision in their movements, forcing her to take it painfully slowly to ensure she didn't accidentally smash the podium and trigger the burn.

It wasn't much of a plan, then again she hadn't had much time to think of it. Which showed when Cricket snorted and muttered something too low for any of them to hear it. Krieg chuckled then pulled Lisa more tightly against himself, "You should tell your woman to stop playing with the vault, if her flowers break anything than this little sneak will be the one, paying."

The assumption didn't bother Taylor nearly so much as Cricket seeing through her planned distraction. Then Brian stepped to the side, putting himself more squarely in front of her and offending her more than a little. Bullets were one thing but she didn't need protected from some old idiot's sexist diatribe.

Her righteous anger sputtered out when she saw the rough patch of his darkness on Brian's back, hidden from the Empire Capes' views by his boosted physique, it showed a...

_'Is that a...Italy? A boot? What the fuck does a boot have to do with any...'_

The angle he'd occupied blocked almost the entire elevator from her sight and she from theirs. The exception was a sliver of Krieg's lower body that she could see through the gap between Brian's arm and torso, which served well to draw her eye to his foot. His tapping foot.

She was quick to wipe the smile off her features. Concealed face or not, it might still give her away if she wasn't careful. She had no real idea how precise Cricket's echolation was, though it seemed that someone could get around it pretty nicely.

_'If he's here, and this fits him too well for him not be, where would he...the elevator, it has to be.'_

Not that she could check, she was just going to have to trust that she and Brian weren't just seeing things, and that Rachel had picked up on the interplay. With a deep breath, Taylor committed to the only plan that stood to get them all out of there before reinforcements -Empire or PRT, it would make little difference for their prospects of success- showed up and ruined the evening completely.

Cricket didn't react at first, but stiffened the moment her plants began moving faster than half an inch a second or so. The mute woman hesitated another second, more time to twine her vines around the podium and order her plants deeper in the entry tunnel to accomplish the other part of the plan, then she was grabbing Krieg's sleeve and flicking her fingers through signs instead of bothering with the electric vocal chords.

"You must really want me to kill this one, boy, not that I should be surprised at disloyalty. I won't tell you to stop your woman ag-"

Rachel cut him off, "That's my teammate you got, not Grue's. You shouldn't have done that, let her go or we'll wreck your vault then kill you."

It was Hookwolf's turn to beat Krieg to getting words out, "You're fucking bluffing. Not that you little shits could eat us anyway, how about we just come over there and kill you instead of fucking around with all this hostage crap?"

Rachel's answer wasn't directed at any of the Empire capes, rather she met Lisa's gaze and held it while a number of expressions crossed the captured girl's features -fear, anger, understanding, delight, fear again- before acceptance spread stilled them. Lisa nodded and Rachel returned the gesture stiffly.

Then she pursed her lips, gave an incredibly loud whistle and a whole host of things happened at once.

Brian swamped Hookwolf and Cricket in his darkness while accelerating into a charge towards them; Rachel's dogs came forward alongside him, looking normal sized beside his bulk, with Rachel right behind them.

Taylor pushed with one set of plants and pulled sharply with another, the latter action tearing the secure podium from the vault floor and pulling it into the outer vault inches ahead of the fires suddenly filling the inner vault.

Krieg pulled the trigger, simultaneously striking a bizarre disco pose that left his borrowed gun pointed into the darkness settling over Hookwolf.

Events collided, Krieg's pose let Lisa slip away from him and dive for the floor of the corridor. Brian slammed into Hookwolf as he was emerging from the darkness with two pony-sized dogs backing him up and the impact sent the half-transformed mass of blades flying back into the elevator, forcing Krieg to flatten himself against the side of it. Cricket leapt out of the darkness aiming for Brian's shoulder, only for whatever target she had planned to be denied to her when Rachel vaulted her ally and landed with both feet slamming into the other woman's head-cage, reversing her momentum.

Then Lisa slid clumsily between Brian's legs and the whole group was backtracking as fast as they could without giving an opening, Brian letting his darkness dissolve rather than trying to drain any of them. Instead of pursuing, Krieg drew a second gun then emptied the weapon in each hand into the elevator ceiling. His smug posture sagged when Conductor's voice sounded from the tunnel they had entered by, complaining loudly about the slope of the tunnel Taylor had made by punching her plants up through the elevator shaft's wall.

Now she focused on those plants and commanded them to go a little wild. The noise that echoed down the shaft and out of the elevator was incredible, the opportunity to rub their victory in was even better.

"I'm not sure which was dumber; fighting Grue in a confined space, Bitch in close quarters or me underground." She tapped a finger against the plants covering her lips while the realisation spread across their faces, "No, your worst mistake was definitely threatening one of the Sirens."

Not her best line ever, but collapsing an elevator shaft on someone made for pretty strong punctuation.

Lisa stared at the rubble filling the elevator doors, "...Did you just kill them, no, Hookwolf covered them, he'll dig them out. Uh, th-thanks I guess."

Even Conductor was aware enough not to comment on the quiver in her voice, though he'd probably rub in that he avoided capture later, for now it went uncommented on. Rachel squeezed Lisa's shoulder in her usual slightly unsure way, then she was turning to face the inner vault and the thick coil of charred vines wrapped around the podium.

Taylor had them unfurl, the living vines dragging those that had been killed by the fire, while Brian set it upright and the device turned out to be somehow intact and functional. An internal battery was to be expected but the lack of any mechanical damage was not, then a chime proved that it wasn't just the podium that was surprisingly tough. The top of one section hissed and a number of cylinders rose smoothly from it, Lisa snuck past them to grab her flash drive -declaring that it must be lucky to have survived all that- while Rachel carefully transferred half a dozen thick vials to the packs that Angelica and Judas were carrying.

The sound of shifting debris from the elevator cut short any celebration at obtaining their prize, instead they retreated into the tunnel and got ready to leave.

Planning had not covered ever eventuality, but them being discovered had come up and they'd agreed that using the entry tunnel to leave would be a bad move if it happened. The risk of an ambush was too great. Instead Taylor directed all of them to stand in very specific locations around the tunnel and then focused all her attention inwards.

She was so absorbed in her creation that she barely noticed Lisa sending a message and telling her to add another leaf just in case, the change was easy but the creation itself was fiddly. She completely missed Rachel using her power in earnest to bring her dogs from pony-sized to living tanks. Then she hit the tipping point, the landscape of twisting forms fell away and suddenly all that was left was feeding her power into what she had forged and letting it grow.

The leaves came first, thick and soft to cushion them all, surrounding them individually and pulling them into place. Only she could feel the rest, her plants moving in complex swirls and spirals that she had made sure avoided the corridor and vault where seven men were still lying helpless, but which she had not otherwise limited. The soil churned and Taylor considered just how happy her dad would be with her latest bout of property destruction as her tree exploded from the ground to rise forty stories in a barely more than a minute. She barely noticed the leaf catching Emma, not to say she wasn't very happy to confirm her friend was safe but the sheer joy of her power took her by surprise sometimes.

The night air -smog and salt, the scent of home- reminded her that this was the time for being professional, not getting caught up in how pretty a tree she had made. She gave Emma enough of a look to assure herself her crazy friend hadn't gotten herself hurt any worse than usual, then got to climbing the dog that Rachel directed her way and...well then the same dog was directed to pick up Brian and they were bounding away over the rooftops and suddenly being professional was a lot harder because she was pressed against Brian's chest and even if he'd let go of most of his transformation to ease Brutus' burden it was still incredibly distracting.

Her comment before the briefing came back to her then. Despite the embarrassment she couldn't help but think that she had been completely right, he smelt wonderful and his broad chest against her back made her unsure if she wanted to fly or fall into the most peaceful sleep imaginable. Still, she was pretty confident that she didn't let on how much she felt like warm jelly in a skin stocking while she tried to find her thoughts. Emma and Lisa already teased her enough as it was.

Subtle investigation was called for. She'd shift back just a little, like she was trying to get comfortable on Brutus' back, and see how she felt then.

An incredibly unwelcome interruption came from off to her left where Judas was carrying Lisa, Conductor and Emma, the familiar voice had her directing Brutus in a new direction before she'd consciously registered it. When the Bat came for you there was no room for hesitation.

Rachel held to that maxim perfectly with a leaping charge that left her grappling the vigilante out of the air, though Taylor could already see Emma had been downed and the two still on Judas were unlikely to be much use against this opponent. Unless he brought that annoying friend of his-

A downpour of lasers aimed at Judas announced Magpie's presence and had Taylor cursing her thoughts for jinxing it.

The Bat's more brightly attired -that is to say he wore colours other than those suited to blend with the night- partner soared down on considerably more solid wings than Bat's glider cape. The orbs he clenched in each hand poured out lasers, the individual impacts were barely enough to stir dust but sheer weight of fire nearly tore Lisa from her seat and cannot have felt good on her injuries.

He came back around for another pass, attaching his laser weapons to the tops of each wing than unclipping himself from the flight tech at just the right moment. His perfectly judged trajectory would have neatly intersected Judas' path had Conductor not whipped out a fog horn and blasted it in a swift double beat that drove Magpie to jerk his arms and swerve his fall wildly to the left. Even as he fell beneath the rooftops however, his hovering wings were breaking off in two separate flight paths to harry Judas' passengers further. The attached laser weapons had significantly lowered output though, so Taylor kept Brutus on course for where Rachel had engaged the Bat.

Brian stood up, hands on her shoulders for balance, as they approached. Only to falter when they got close enough to see down to the unusually low rooftop where the two fighters had landed after Rachel's tackle. It wasn't exactly a furious struggle for victory.

Sure, they were fighting...it just wasn't much of a fight. They were alternating between hand to hand clashes and mid range exchanges of projectiles, Bat's gadget bombs against a barrage of random debris from Rachel. However Rachel was fighting in her bodysuit without enhancement while the Bat barely threw anything more threatening than smoke. Angelica wasn't even intervening in the battle, just sitting off to the side and looking a huge bored puppy.

Then Rachel rolled to her feet after Bat broke a grapple that seemed more about pressing herself against his back than restricting his movements effectively and they started talking while circling one another.

"Now what's a nice girl like you doing fleeing a crime scene?" Bat's voice had mysteriously lost the reverberating growl he typically effected, leaving a surprisingly pleasant baritone.

"I stole everything in their vault. Wouldn't be a good thief if I hung around after." Meanwhile Rachel's voice had crept an octave higher and gained an edge that Taylor never got used to hearing.

"You're keeping the contents of a whole vault in that suit? I don't see many pockets."

"You should search me. I'll keep still."

"Bitch, are you trying to seduce me?"

In lieu of answering directly she rushed him and a flurry of blow and counterblow followed. Much more intense than the previous exchanges, it ended with Rachel scoring a shallow cut across the Bat's exposed cheek before he planted a solid kick in her gut only for her to ride most of the force back into a couple of rapid somersaults that left heron her belly some yards away.

Bat's tongue darted out to lick the blood welling up from his cheek and Taylor started to feel a little uncomfortable watching. Brian shifted beside her but neither of them dared intervene and risk drawing both combatants' ire.

Then Rachel flipped forward onto her feet with a noise that could be politely described as sensual and growled, "You want to fuck?"

If it wouldn't mean abandoning her friend to face an enemy alone then that would have definitely been Taylor's cue to leave.

Bat had a slight smile on his usually stoic face, Rachel's grin looked terrifyingly toothsome but he must have seen some charm in it because he took a step closer and continued the conversation.

"Do you mean right here? There's all kinds of issues with that, I don't know where to start."

"You scared of a little dirt?" This time she took the step closer.

"We're being watched you know, the PRT might find us too." He stepped closer, only barely out of striking range.

"I don't mind," Taylor wanted to shout that she very much minded but this was the furthest their flirting had ever gotten and it was too fascinating to stop now; "...you shy?"

Somehow that was the signal for another skirmish, this time they went with pure grapples over punches and kicks, the advantage seeming to be firmly Rachel's as she span about every limb the Bat tried to grab her with. Then he abruptly fell over backwards while she was clinging to his neck, his hands finding her head and keeping her from escaping before she broke his fall. Brian muttered that he was shielding her head from the hard rooftop but Taylor was more concerned with the way Bat flipped over and stared down at her chest to chest, their faces less than a foot apart.

"I have a girlfriend you know. Sort of."

"Wasn't asking if you wanted to date."

"I'm not sure if she'd see much difference."

"She ain't here. Just you," she grabbed his cape -which had given Taylor a nasty electric shock last time she tried that- and flipped them so she was on top of him; "and me."

Whatever she had been going to do to follow up that line went undone as a pulse of force rippled the air and sent her rolling across the rooftop in a tangle of limbs. Halfway through she must have twisted into the roll because she came out of it on her feet and glaring daggers at Magpie where he hovered quietly off to the side of the roof.

Bat's self-proclaimed partner didn't spare her so much as a glance, he was far too busy yelling down at the feared vigilante.

"How many times do I need to ask you to let me handle her? You always get distracted and let her get away!"

Without waiting for a reply the flying cape divebombed Rachel and she broke into a sprint for where Angelica was rising to her feet. Bat stared after her and his partner with a distinctly bemused expression.

Taylor didn't waste the opening.

Any signal to Brian would tip him off, experience had taught her how ridiculously observant he was, so she just hurled herself at him at the tip of a bundle of vines. The split second advantage was all she needed, even as he released a cloud of his distinctively coloured knockout gas she didn't falter.

His voice came from several directions at once, the growl most definitely back, "Haven't I used gas on you a few times before Vine? You're smarter than that."

Taylor grinned behind her mask's organic filters. She most definitely was smarter than to let him use the same countermeasure against her without any response. She reached the centre of the gas cloud, judging by the length of the vines supporting her, and let them drop her to the rooftop. He was too cautious to risk close combat with her after she had already demonstrated changes to her costume, but he wouldn't leave the cloud while Grue was watching the outside of it. Assured that he would be within range Taylor could prepare her attack, an explosion of flora that would...that would...

The breeze on her lips registered and she was clapping a hand over her mouth even as her knees buckled beneath her.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Brian wasn't worried about the gas knocking him out, even on a low charge like this his body would resist most drugs by the size boost alone. What did worry him was the way that an errant streamer of he gas had bloen his way and dissolved his mask around the mouth. Not that the hows and whys were hard to figure out. Clearly the Bat had been a step ahead yet again. Taylor's filters were probably gone but he didn't even give serious thought to rushing into the cloud after her. This stuff wouldn't so much as give her a headache.

So he kept up his slow circling of the rooftop until the gas was joined by a different coloured cloud of what he assumed was a counter agent, then both dispersed to reveal Bat crouching on top of an antennae and watching Vine through his cowl. The supervillainess was curled in a ball with her right hand still clenched over her nose and mouth. She was breathing though, so Brian dismissed her from his mind with no small force of will. There would be time for that once he'd beaten the Bat into the approximate size and shape of an actual bat.

Bat was faster, had shown it in every one of the five fights they'd had so far, so Brian didn't even try to make the first move. When grey gas exploded out from then other cape Brian merely watched for the inevitable grapple line firing out of it, then tore a brick from the roof ledge and hurled it at the ascending shape reeling in the line.

Bat dropped before the brick got near him, but the new landing point was only a dozen yards away, close enough for Brian to charge. Strength meant speed at such a distance and the pulverised footprint of rooftop where he had been standing was testament to Brian's strength. He was on top of the other cape before he could react, wrapping a massive hand around his neck and lifting him easily above head height. However when he swept his arm back down his fist was suddenly empty.

A trio of explosions lit up his back and dropped several of his bandoleers to the ground with charred ends. Brian staggered forward and whirled around, but the Bat was long gone leaving only a sparking collar in his fist.

_'A phasing device? Must have gotten a close look at that lunatic, Midnight Huntress.'_

It was no big surprise, the fourth time they fought Brian had almost broken Bat's back -though he'd since become certain the other cape had some kind of healing factor anyway- with the same move and the vigilante was famous for never getting caught out the same way twice. Brian took a few minutes to try and find him before giving it up as futile to try and see through his stealth technique. Instead he began pumping out darkness in every direction.

He wasn't expecting it to have much sensory effect, but the drain would be severe for a cape like the Bat and that would force him to leave his hiding place. Instead another few bursts of grey smoke marked out several locations, nothing to say which -if any- was his real hiding place but it wouldn't matter...

Except it turned out that it did because something in the smoke blocked his darkness from spreading into it. Nothing but a delaying tactic, however with the PRT on the way that was all the Bat needed to win.

With no other choice, Brian picked out a patch of smoke and sprinted for it. He pulled some more of his charged darkness out as he ran, almost the last of it, and boosted himself as much as he could without compromising agility against a smaller opponent. He still must have topped ten feet tall with the latest bulk-up.

The smoke turned out to be empty except for a trio of remote explosives that felt like an iron pipe to the shins, worse as he Hurst from the other side his watch on the rest of the roof yielded nothing. Bat wasn't going to come out of hiding on his own.

_'I need to draw him out, assuming he's even still on the roof.'_

Except him leaving the roof would keep him from detonating the bombs, and there was no way he'd risk leaving remote mines on a random rooftop. He had to be watching somehow, something exotic enough to get around his darkness. All those rants he'd lent Taylor an ear for did occasionally result in useful knowledge, like knowing that more exotic tinker tech sensors tended to have a severe tradeoff between size and range.

Leaping straight at the grey cloud still occupying the centre of the roof, Brian was careful to remember where Taylor had been when the smoke went up. His landing was well away from the spot where she had fallen, but he was blinded and choked by the smoke and the Bat could escape or harry him at his leisure. The next part of his plan would change that though.

The pouch had luckily not been on one of the bandoleers he lost to the explosives, though losing the whole thing here did sting a little. Flashbangs weren't cheap to buy without alerting the authorities and the bag had contained more than a dozen of them. Of course Taylor would be fine even if she was awake, with the earplugs she'd made in the vault and her standard visor. For himself Brian opted to sweep his hands through the gas hard enough to clear a little of it, enough to pump full of his power and stuff his head inside.

Through the muted filter, Brian saw and heard the blast but it was like looking at a picture of it. Clearly bright and loud, but not in a way that effected him. More importantly he had gotten lucky, the blast proved strong enough to clear the smoke entirely and that left the Bat wide open. Already discarding a thick faceplate that didn't seem to have weathered the blast well, he was drawing that damn grapple gun when Brian made it into reach. The first punch had him leaning back almost horizontal to avoid it, Brian followed it with another and another and another.

The Bat was forced onto the backfoot, too busy retreating to make use of his grapple or even get to his other gadgets. It wasn't anything new though, Brian had been here before and he knew that the slippery bastard would fine a way out sooner or later. Pushing him back wasn't nearly so hard as pinning him in place, though they were rapidly coming up on the centre of the roof again and the shed that enclosed the stairs up to it might make for a way to corner him.

He didn't react to his opponent fumbling his next handspring, given the rarity of the Bat making genuine mistakes seeing through the ruse wasn't hard. Noticing the unfairly small mine that he had palmed and planted during the feint turned out to be harder. It burst beneath him and a globe of thick foul-smelling adhesive expanded around his foot, cutting off his advance.

But while it was a close thing, he had noticed the mine. The instant that Bat stopped, pressed against the roof access shed just inches too far off for a blow to reach him, Brian was stepping forward with his free leg and then heaving his other up with every scrap of strength he had.

The tinker glue was stronger than his current boost, the roof wasn't a match for either of them. The way that the vigilante's jaw dropped when he threw a kick with a lump of roof still attached would be a memory Brian held close for years to come. Though the night would give him better ones yet.

Unable to retreat through the wall behind him, The Bat stepped forward into the arc of the kick. He rode with the blow and Brian couldn't do much about it with the roof chunk weighing his leg down, but that hadn't been the aim. The aim was to force him to make contact with his own glue, and now his entire arm had pressed against the sticky goop.

Brian reversed the kick despite the screaming of every muscle in his leg, slamming his foot down on the roof with the Bat still attached. The other cape was already scrambling at his belt, Brian would bet on something to dissolve the adhesive, even he wasn't quick enough to get it out before Brian brought his fist down however.

The one-handed handstand he somehow pulled off in order to dodge seemed distinctly unfair, though Brian would grudgingly admit to being impressed that he managed it from the position he had. A large part of that grudging admittance might have stemmed from how deep into the roof Brian's fist went after failing to crush the Bat's leg. Or rather, the immediate results of that damage would form the roots of Brian's magnanimity.

The roof gave out beneath them, the flat concrete crumbling as whatever architecture supported it retired that support, and Brian fell with the Bat still attached by a thread of adhesive that had yet to dissolve. Brian slapped him downwards just to make sure.

They fell into empty office spaces, both of them sticking the landing with practised ease, nothing but work lights and empty space to fill the entire floor. Until the rubble came down at least, that certainly livened the place up. It also blocked off much of the floor, leaving them with a roughly circular area about fifty feet across and enough of a distance up to the roof that Bat would be needing his grapple to get back up with any speed.

Sixth time must have been the charm, because Brian finally had his arena and the Bat wasn't slipping away from him this time. The vigilante looked a lot smaller all of a sudden. _'Much more fragile.'_ Brian thought with a toothy grin adorning his exposed mouth.

Then it vanished as he looked past the Bat to where a section of the roof was still crumbling away, to where Taylor was lying on what was about to be open air and a long drop onto jagged debris.

He would always be ashamed of what came next, no matter how much he told himself about the cold calculus that was required of a fighter the guilt would always be there. He looked at the girl about to fall, helpless and immobile and he wondered what to do.

Taylor wasn't tough but her armour was pretty well made, made for exactly this kind of thing in fact. If she got lucky the fall would only break a bone or two, she had made healing plants for their non-Brute friends more times than he cared to count. Meanwhile he had no illusions of his chances against the Bat if he let the vigilante out of the accidental coliseum. If he didn't defeat the other cape, then only Rachel would be left to defeat two of the Bay's strongest heroes and evacuate the five of them. Jail was pretty inevitable if he lost here, which would mean Taylor was imprisoned right alongside him. The smart thing to do was to let her fall and finish things here.

So Brian supposed that he must not be as smart as he liked to think he was, because the arguments had barely crossed his mind before he discarded the lot of them at the sight of Taylor falling. He was moving before he even realised it, leaving a footprint embedded in the bare concrete floor and quickly adding a great many more. The Bat dived out of the way and was completely ignored, the hateful sound of his grappling gun firing barely registered as he tracked her descent. He dived without the slightest regard for what the rebar he had been so afraid to see her hit might do to him

It pierced his leg despite all the boosts to his toughness, his own weight and momentum driving it home. Brian barely felt it for the relief that was her weight settling into his hands. He looked her over with no small amount of desperation for any wounds, any sign that he had failed another girl in his life, then he heaved a sigh that fluttered her wig when he found nothing but the gentle rise and fall of her breath.

And then, because she was safe and he was a damn sore loser, Brian snatched up a chunk of concrete and spun his upper body into the throw.

The Bat was only a few feet from the roof when the projectile smashed his grapple's anchor point and he lost his upward pull. What momentum he had already gained brought him to within a finger's width of a handhold, then he was falling back to the arena floor. The battle wasn't over and done quite yet.

Brian put Taylor down as carefully as he could, brushing the false hair from her face and letting himself wish for a moment that it was the real thing. He loved her hair.

Then he was standing up, his face hard and unmoved by the agony of yanking his leg off of the rebar that had speared through his thigh. Since bleeding out was a little more concerning than having to spend a week farming back-alley scumbags he tugged the last of his charged darkness out of his store canister and pulled it below his skin. He was slightly over twelve feet tall when he pulled off the canister and tossed it aside, the bleeding of his leg wound already slowed from torrential to a sluggish oozing.

He didn't bother with casting out any more darkness, the Bat probably had another countermeasure up his sleeve and anyway, he wanted a clean fight with the vigilante. No more tricks.

Laughter was definitely unexpected, but the grim chuckle really was coming out of his opponent's mouth. Brian refused to let it effect him, this was no place for mindgames.

"I'm pretty relieved right now," the bat disagreed; "It looks like you're all out and you won't be getting any bigger from now on."

He reached to the back of his hefty belt, where it was entirely hidden by the cape, and Brian felt the familiar sting of being a step behind right to the end.

"I was worried these things wouldn't work if you got any bigger." With those words the Bat pulled out...Brian honestly wasn't sure. He held them like oversized knuckledusters but the flat panel of the front reminded him more of the oversized defibrillators common in movies and unheard of in real hospitals.

The way the flat panels began glowing seemed pretty damn ominous, but Brian was at a point where solid steel lost to him in arm wrestling. He charged and put all his weight behind the second punch he threw.

His feint was ignored as he had planned, then his plan went straight to hell as the Bat met his second punch with one of his own. Brian had a brief moment to hope that the impact would obey common sense and result in the vigilante's arm shattering like glass, then his hope dissolved into agonising spasms.

Full awareness came back after he had taken several steps back, the Bat following closely and leading with the other of those damn electro-dusters. The one in his free hand looked dim, rather than test that theory Brian dived into a roll. The Aikido movements looked bizarre when he was this big, but they were damn effective on equal sized opponents and fleeing from them.

Using it to escape a man who couldn't even bench a car was a bit humiliating but Brian was more concerned with staying the hell away than how it would look on an imaginary livestream.

The next few moments had Brian coming to enjoy things a lot more than the first clash would have made him think he would. His size and strength let him create distance far more easily than the Bat could close it, for the first time it was him being the frustrating asshole and the Bat having to chase him every which way. They both knew that attempting to escape would inevitably open the vigilante to reprisal, so he was stuck chasing Brian and spending considerably more stamina every step of the way.

_'I wonder if he even gets tired? I've never really seen much to suggest it.'_

It was the chaser who broke the silence otherwise filled only with the sounds of movement, exertion and settling debris.

"I wonder what your girlfriend would think if she knew you almost didn't save her?"

While the taunt certainly stabbed home, Brian only drew strength from it. He wasn't planning to hide what he had nearly done from her, nor would her inevitable hatred change a damn thing about his decision. He was protecting her and his friends, reminding him of that only sharpened his movements. Not that the failure of one taunt discouraged the other fighter.

"What about your family, huh? You really want to put them through a trial? Seems stupid to m-"

Bat found himself barely side-stepping enough of a back kick to merely be thrown by it and not flung like a rag doll. The conflicted torrent of emotions that that particular topic always brought up did nothing to dull Brian's edge, he reined in his chase of the tumbling cape before the counter attack and started circling his foe with just a few yards between them.

He didn't worry when the bat stopped with his back to Taylor's form. Another enemy might have turned and attacked her, but for all his attempts at getting under the skin the Bat had missed any number of opportunities to take a hostage. Clearly he had more decency than that. Might explain why his taunts suc-

"This is pretty small for you. Didn't you fight Lung to a standstill last year?"

...It was pretty obviously rhetorical given the aftermath had made national headlines, Brian certainly couldn't forget that fight. By the time he had run out of gang members to drain and they had broken off to leave things at a mutually agreed draw, their battle had reduced a full block of the Docks to ruins and then turned those ruins into a swamp. Lung had held nothing back and went wild with his hydrokinesis and terrakinesis to ward off the darkness that would sap some of even his endless strength.

What Brian had never told anyone was just how close he had come to continuing the brawl. It would have been so easy to drain a few civilians to keep pushing himself higher, tide himself over until he could pin Lung down long enough to get a real boost. That temptation, that craving for more and everything it reminded him of had been his cue to leave the fight. He'd kept his silence on it but something in Lung's eyes had said he understood.

The memory of that battle was one of the most vivid he possessed. Which was why he couldn't stop himself sinking into it for just a second.

The next second was full of pain.

So much pain.

He'd gotten too close. Gotten too cocky. Now he was getting beat bad enough to make him woozily wonder if his dad was secretly the Bat. Make-up could explain the skin colour, though he had no idea how to explain his father being a full foot taller.

The place his mind had gone to to escape the convulsing agony was apparently not entirely disconnected from the real world though, because even there he heard an incredibly meaty thunk as the pain ended abruptly. Then a voice he was really starting to love was yelling something too muffled and complicated for him to understand it, it did make him want to open his eyes though.

He found the Bat had been replaced with the much more pleasant sight of Taylor in a crouch that had both her arms forward and up, surrounded by a dense cluster of green plant things...vines!

Thought came back and he sat up fast, finding his body a lot closer to his regular size than it had been just a few seconds ago. As flattering as tinkertech made just to bring him down was, he crushed the electro-dusters lying beside him before looking at anything else. Mostly that meant looking at Taylor.

Her hand had finally left her face and its absence revealed a truly ugly looking plant -he assumed, it looked like a pinkish sort of internal organ- pulsing over her exposed mouth and nose. She ripped it loose with a truly nauseating series of pops a heartbeat later, the plants around her arms having fallen loose, and practically hurled herself at him.

"I'm sorry, I'm so sorry, I hit him as soon as I could but you were screaming and I'm so sorry..."

Brian wrapped his arms around her and let her get it out. If she was relaxed enough to talk like this then the fight was over. He trusted her on that. Sure enough when he got his feet underneath himself and stood with her still trembling slightly in his arms, he found the vigilante slumped on the concrete almost the full width of the open floor space away from them.

For all that it had been a fight and they'd both been trying to hurt one another badly enough to win, Brian was glad when Taylor stepped down and had her plants convey all of them up to the rooftop. He wasn't sure he'd have been able to resist the urge to toss the caped prat up if he'd had the task.

They found Brutus waiting for them and sirens sounding far too close for comfort. A few roof hops back to their original route brought them to where Rachel had ziptied a bruised and fuming Magpie before tending to the three who'd gotten knocked out with what had the signs of yet more sleep-inducing tinkertech while her other two dogs circled.

Rachel took the Bat from them with a lot of gentleness, but she didn't waste any time on ceremony. After he was put down they were on the dogs and back to running away in exactly the amount of time it took to get all of them on a dog with an unconscious friend in front of them. Brian held Alec in place and let his mind wander.

So arriving on the rooftop of the building whose basement the Siren's had put their base's secondary tunnel entrance in came as a surprise. He dismounted mechanically, firmly back to his usual height and size, and put Alec in the recovery position beside the other two. Then he went to the edge of the roof to stand and watch the waves out in the bay while Rachel let her dogs shed their mass slowly and comfortably.

Taylor coming up beside him was equal parts welcome and terrifying. It would have been even with just the events of before the briefing, though that all seemed a bit ridiculous now. He had no idea what to even say. It all sounded like excuses and only deepened the guilt building in his gut.

For the second time in twenty four hours she surprised him with a hand on his mask. This time she was tugging for attention, but she got a crooked smile as he turned to her and took another few seconds to get the ruined mask settled nicely on his face.

"I kind of like seeing your mouth. How about a redesign?" Her expression faded to neutral under his sad gaze. Which finally shamed him enough to open his mouth.

"T-Vine I mean...I-"

His budding babbling was cut off entirely when she went up on her tip toes and planted a quick kiss on his exposed cheek. She drew back immediately, face bright red and looked firmly at the ground.

"I get it. I was awake the whole time and I heard what he said but I also saw what you did and...I understand. Really. So don't you dare feel bad. Anyway, that was just for saving me and stuff so I'll be going now..."

She was turning away before she'd even gotten to trailing off awkwardly. Brian didn't even notice he'd clasped her hand in his own until their grip pulled her at both their arms and she was pulled up short. She turned and seemed equally surprised by the grasp. She didn't let go though, and neither did he...their hands just fit too well.

_'Carpe diem, right?'_

Then he was pulling her back to him and wrapping his free arm around her shoulders while he kissed her full on the mouth.

It dragged on past what he had intended with her stiff and not reacting and he felt like he would explode with tension and fear and guilt and...and then she kissed him back like he was air and she had just burst from the sea.

He pulled her as close as he could and she moulded herself to his body. There was a pair of heartbeats in his ear but he couldn't tell which was which. His hand slid around the back of her head, then somehow found itself under her costume and tangled in her real hair. Both of her arms had found their way around his neck and when they finally broke for air she was hanging off him with her feet a few inches off the ground.

He couldn't tear his eyes away from her, vaguely aware that the grin on his face was probably as incredibly stupid looking as the beautiful one mirroring it. She pulled him back down and this time they reached a unanimous decision, somehow, to deepen the kiss. Urgently pressing closer-

_clink_

Teeth meeting teeth turned out to be pretty painful. They both flinched back and she was back on the ground.

Smiles didn't falter at the pain though, not either of theirs.

Catcalls announced four more smiles that were just as unfaltering. Along with the stares of three very baffled looking dogs.

OOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO

Rachel considered it a pretty decent evening overall. Not just because her dogs were taken care of and she had a full array of snacks to work through together with them while she watched Simba's journey to become king of the Pride Lands for the fifth time...this year.

The vault job had gone well. She'd gotten to have some fun while they were doing it too, she was asking Taylor for some shock gloves or something tomorrow.

She couldn't ask her right now because as soon as they'd all been showered and changed and stuff, Grue and Taylor had vanished somewhere, only Lisa's retreat to her room with all the papers and that black case had been faster. Rachel had checked Taylor's room at the base, plus the one for guests and found both empty. Not that she was surprised that they were still wasting time, seeing them kiss had not stopped her suspicion that the two of them didn't actually know what sex was.

Simba and Nala didn't mess around like those two. They saw what was obvious and boom, love. Then cute little cubs to hold up in the air like she had secretly done with every pup she'd looked after who was old enough not to be frightened by it.

Even Conductor seemed like he got it. He was singing along at least, maybe if she got him to sing some proper love songs at them they might fucking get on with it. Fucking get on with fucking. She snorted and then felt bad for laughing during the big crescendo.

Emma looked over at her and she felt even worse, interrupting the movie for others wasn't cool. Rachel ignored the anger that always came when she felt bad because of someone else, Emma was her friend and she wasn't going to yell at her when she hadn't done anything. Then Emma showed submission and she realised that the other girl hadn't been upset with her at all. Rachel didn't let herself feel embarrassed at not understanding. That had been what her friends had told her when they talked about it a few months after Lisa joined, she didn't need to feel embarrassed.

So far Emma was the only one she could really not feel stupid with. She didn't know why, thinking on it didn't help so she looked back to the screen and grabbed a handful of popcorn.

She was pretty sure that she'd seen the Lion King way back when she'd still lived with her mother, but her first good memory of it had been when she picked it out of the pile of movies Emma brought to her while she was recovering from that stab just a little after they first met. There'd been a lot of good films in that pile, then even more when Taylor came and added to it.

As well as a few pretty bad ones, like the one Taylor brought that she'd loved at first and then cried and yelled at and stopped watching and snapped the disc. She could forgive Taylor but if she ever got her hands on the sick douchebag that made Old Yeller then Rachel was going to punch him. Hard.

She distributed some jerky among her dogs, proper stuff from a local butcher she knew was good, not that chemical crap they sold in convenience stores.

There was another guy that she might have to punch pretty hard.

Taylor hadn't said anything and nor had Grue but Lisa seemed to think that Bat had said some pretty twisted stuff to the two of them when they were fighting. Rachel wasn't sure how she felt about it, even if she got why he had done it.

He'd never done that kind of thing with her and she didn't think he would...she liked him.

Not like Nala and Simba, not really. It was just fun to tease him. Like sparring, but...

If anyone else tried that shit with her she'd probably get pissed off instead of finding it fun. Bat was different.

He was a lot of things that she wasn't and would never be, but he also felt...similar. Like he knew what it was like to barely understand people sometimes, and like he could understand her. Sometimes she looked at him and she could feel what he was feeling, good stuff and bad stuff. Mostly bad stuff.

He felt better when they were having fun, she was certain of that...Rachel liked people to feel better if she could help it, at least the ones who weren't complete fucks. It was just a lot easier to make dogs feel better than humans. Plus, dogs didn't have many heroes to look out for them. Humans had fuckloads of them.

She shook herself out of it. Getting lost in your head didn't help with shit. Too much thinking got in the way more than it helped. Better to kick back with a few movies and some friends to watch them with. She'd figure that shit out tomorrow.

Lisa picked the climax of the film to remind her of exactly why she sometimes wanted to punch the freckled girl, though not until Taylor's sticky moss balls had healed her up a lot more.

The black eye and general battered appearance didn't make her grin any smaller as she strolled into the room and carefully placed that case they'd stolen down in the middle of the snacks. Not the one they'd gone in for, the one she'd found in the hidden compartment that Lisa had taken back to her room.

Emma hit pause and Rachel gave up on enjoying the movie properly.

_'Lisa better have a good fucking reason.'_

Like she'd read her mind, which might be what really happened now she thought about it, Lisa skipped her usual speech and clicked the case open. Then she went and got all dramatic about pulling out a bright pink vial and Rachel realised this was going to be a lot of fucking talking after all.

She munched on some more popcorn while Lisa waggled the vial in Emma's face. Then she closed her eyes and asked the room to wake her up when they were ready to just explain shit quickly and watch the damn movie.

She drifted off while weighing the one with the ass kicking panda against the one with the dragons and Vikings and...stuff...

That film's dragon looked a bit like a Bat.


End file.
